Kasprisin offers reflection on King commencement speech

Lorraine Kasprisin, a professor of secondary education at Woodring College of Education and editor of the Journal of Educational Controversy, offers her personal reflections on the speech Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered at her college commencement in 1963 in a recent blog post for the journal.

She begins:

I first learned about the March on Washington from Martin Luther King, Jr. who was the commencement speaker at my June 1963 graduation from the College of the City of New York. With the 50th anniversary of the historic march on Washington coming up on August 28th, I have been thinking about that commencement event that occurred just two months before the march and the effect that it was to have on my life. In fact, the events of those years had a profound influence on who I was to become as a person. They shaped my social conscience. They shaped the kind of moral questions that I continue to raise in my life even today. And they shaped the type of choices that I made in my life--- my decision to be a teacher, my decision to study philosophy - seriously and deeply, my decision to try to raise the old Socratic questions about the good life and the just society that Socrates raised 2500 years ago and which Dr. King was to raise later under a different set of circumstances, at a different moment in history, to my generation. Ultimately, it led to the creation of the Journal of Educational Controversy and this blog.

Read Kasprisin's full post over on the Journal of Educational Controversy blog.