Martin Luther King Iii

My father's leadership was about more than civil rights. He was deeply concerned with human rights and world peace, and he said so on numerous occasions. He was a civil rights leader, true. But he was increasingly focused on human rights and a global concern and peace as an imperative.

Our kids are reflections of us. How we interact with others, even in a hostile situation... how we respond and our children see that is how they are going to respond.

But my father also supported human rights, freedom and self-determination for all people, including Latino agricultural workers, Native Americans, and the millions of impoverished white men and women who were treated as second-class citizens.

Climate change pries further apart the haves and have-nots.

African Americans are not going to be fooled by any group supported by industrial polluters. They know climate change is real and that we have to do something about it. Only 3 percent believe concern about climate change is overblown.

Our obligation to fight pollution traces the roots of its persuasion to that same moral mountaintop from which my father lent his voice to the voiceless. The pursuit of civil equality in health helped build our environmental laws.

My father would be very concerned about the environment. He'd be disappointed that we have hundreds of thousands and maybe even millions of people who are living out on the streets in the wealthiest nation on the planet. He'd be greatly disappointed because he would know that we can, and we must, do better.

The seminal right of the modern civil rights movement was the right to vote. My father fought so diligently for it. Certainly Congressman John Lewis and many others, Hosea Williams, fought for it as well.

My father's approach to the most brutal and unambiguous social injustices during the civil rights struggle was rooted in nonviolence as a morally and tactically correct response.

I would assume my father would support anything that lifted up and created opportunities for 'the least of these.'

It's time for political leaders across the ideological spectrum to realize that, while partisanship is understandable, hyper-partisanship is destructive to our country. We need more visionary leaders who will earnestly strive for bipartisanship and finding policy solutions that can move America forward.

Because when we look at the modern civil rights movement under the leadership of my father and the team that he developed, it was at the federal level that we were able to appeal to bring about justice, whether it was in relationship to voting rights - just a number of issues.

No one can tell any nation what it should want. The nation should determine what they want and how to make their nation become as best as it can become - all of us want our nations to be the best of what they can become, for our children.

I mean if you stay engaged, and are constantly fighting, you don't have time to regenerate. So sometimes you have to take time to renew your strength and energy, so that you can come back and fight again in a constructive way.

Violence is the language of the unheard.

There is more racial integration in American life and many more people of color serving as elected officials and corporate leaders than there were during my father's time. But there is also reason for concern about new forms of racial oppression, such as measures to make it harder to vote, racial profiling and crushing public worker unions.

And if we truly want a strong and secure middle class, we must restore the ability of labor unions to organize and represent working people.

We all have to be concerned about terrorism, but you will never end terrorism by terrorizing others.