My friend Pamela Brown, the writer behind the words at Emission Control, wrote this on her Facebook wall yesterday on the occasion of Martin Luther King’s birthday.

I liked it and, with her kind permission, I’m reprinting it here:

Today is also my father’s birthday…he is 87… I asked him what he thought, having lived almost twice as long as MLK… He said, “I never thought we would make it this far…we were really the bottom of the bottom…they wanted to wipe us out, but they couldn’t…”

I feel that my father is also an #americanrevolutionary – he fought his whole life for the education of so-called under privileged children with so-called learning disabilities…underlying his tireless efforts was the belief that no matter where any child started, they could rise as a part of African-American progress. For him, his work was political action.

He never made a lot of money like we would think of today, but he always viewed himself as wealthy… Each day he left on his mission before 7am, and *after* work didn’t exist… When he was forced into retirement, he returned as a volunteer… #americanrevolutionary