diversity

Martin Luther King, Jr Day

A US congressman, John Lewis, was 23 years old when he participated in the historic 1963 civil rights “March on Washington” led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Half a century later, journalist Bill Moyers asked Lewis how he was affected by Dr. King’s I Have A Dream speech that day. Mr. Lewis replied, “You couldn’t leave after hearing him speak and go back to business as usual. You had to do something, you had to act. You had to move. You had to go out and spread the good news.”

Kosmos

BY WALT WHITMAN

Who includes diversity and is Nature, 
Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the great charity of the earth and the equilibrium also, 
Who has not look’d forth from the windows the eyes for nothing, or whose brain held audience with messengers for nothing, 
Who contains believers and disbelievers, who is the most majestic lover, 
Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the æsthetic or intellectual, 
Who having consider’d the body finds all its organs and parts good, 
Who, out of the theory of the earth and of his or her body understands by subtle analogies all other theories, 
The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States; 
Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in other globes with their suns and moons, 
Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations, 
The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.

On Diversity

“It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.” 
― Maya Angelou

“There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.  

There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination
they produce more hues than can ever been seen.

There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of
them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted.” 
― Sun Tzu

“It is never too late to give up your prejudices” 
― Henry David Thoreau

On This Day

On May 9, 1994, South Africa’s newly elected Parliament chose Nelson Mandela to be the first president of the post-apartheid era.

The New York Times wrote, “The power that had belonged to whites since they first settled on this cape 342 years ago passed today to a Parliament as diverse as any in the world, a cast of proud survivors who began their work by electing Nelson Mandela to be the first black president of South Africa.”