Find your own personal power, centers of influence, and spheres where your voice is heard, and exercise them for justice, truth, righteousness, love, and peace.
God has given them to you to use for what is right.
It is up to you to find and use them.
Here is that whole text:
"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I understand there are a good many Southerners in the room tonight. I know the South very well. I spent twenty years there one night."
"Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant and this white waitress came up to me and said, 'We don't serve colored people here.' I said, 'That's all right. I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.'"
Then these three white boys came up to me and said, 'Boy, we're giving you fair warning. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you.' So I put down my knife and fork, I picked up that chicken and I kissed it. Then I said, 'Line up, boys!'"
"Once I accept injustice, I become injustice. For example, paper mills give off a terrible stench. But the people who work there don't smell it. Remember, Dr. King was assassinated when he went to work for garbage collectors. To help them as workers to enforce their rights. They couldn't smell the stench of the garbage all around them anymore. They were used to it. They would eat their lunch out of a brown bag sitting on the garbage truck. One day, a worker was sitting inside the back of the truck on top of the garbage, and got crushed to death because no one knew he was there." – Dick Gregory
Here is my take-away today:
The man on the back of the garbage truck, making the best of his situation and environment, died because no one knew he was there.
To borrow the title of Ralph Ellison's 1952 classic, he was an invisible man.
His contribution to society was invisible and unseen. So was the injustice that shaped his invisible world. His pain was unseen. His body blended in with the garbage around him and he was swept up in the indiscriminate sweep of all that seemed disposable.
Yet, in death, he became visible.
And Dr. King saw him so vividly and clearly that, in his light, he saw the hundreds of people in the same situation and he went to Memphis to help make them visible.
In his visibility, he became a target and there,in Memphis, he died a martyr's death.
Once I accept injustice, I become injustice.
We cannot accept injustice or let it remain invisible. Nor can we accept the fact that any of our brothers and sisters can sit in the garbage without anyone knowing they are there.
We cannot allow people to be swept away in the daily removal of waster and refuse.
I say it again:
Find your own personal power, centers of influence, and spheres where your voice is heard, and exercise them for justice, truth, righteousness, love, and peace.
Pastor Tom's Community 
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