GRP Co-Founder Mel King's Address to the 2010 GRP Convention

Congratulations on the campaigns that were waged on both local and statewide levels. Congratulations also to the organizations that received awards today and to all for believing we can get stronger. We must and we will.

When we’re asked why people would want to join with us and we with them, what is it that we offer that shows we are in touch spiritually, socially, psychologically?

The Dream Girls sing, “We should let them have our music, so they can feel as good as we.” What do we have to give, so that people want to feel as good as we do?

Historian and theologian Vincent Harding (who wrote Martin Luther King, An Inconvenient Hero) writes in There is a River that the struggle has always been for a “new and informed humanity, and not equal opportunity in a dehumanized society.“ He further reminds us that we are in a noble experiment – this thing called “democracy.” It is a work in progress.

Are we the ones we are looking for, with the ideas and willingness to dance furiously during hard times?, as Alice Walker asks. Are we remembering the willingness to go to jail of by the civil rights movement, women's movement, and labor movements, based on the belief that they had right to define the conditions for participation politically, socially, and economically?