KELLER: APPLY KING DREAM TO OWN STORY

Cyrus Keller urged a Southeast Missouri State University audience Monday to do more than merely acknowledge the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of racial equality.

Keller, an American Methodist Episcopal minister from St. Louis, said black Americans should make King's dream and history part of their own, personal history.

"You want to remember Martin?" he said. "Remember his story and wedge your story to his and it will be just as you want it."

Keller spoke to about 75 people assembled at Academic Auditorium for a program in honor of the slain civil rights leader.

Monday night's program was held in conjunction with other events at the university in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The annual King memorial breakfast was held earlier in the day at the University Center, where the Rev. S. Lewis Bradford of St. Louis spoke on "reclaiming the dream."

The annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Freedom March will be held Sunday. Marchers will meet at the Common Pleas Courthouse and proceed to St. James AME Church, where a program titled "Martin Luther King: His Legacy to the Church" will be held.

At the program Monday night, Keller told his audience that black Americans need to apply King's precepts to their own life story.

"Your story is just beginning," Keller said. "Martin's story has been told and is being retold. Everyone in this room has a story.

"If we're going to reclaim the dream, your story, my story and his story must all fit together to make our story."

Keller said he was reared as was King in a day when blacks were taught they must do more than simply "look out for themselves." He said that King epitomized the selflessness of a man who devoted his life to serving others.

"He was born with a silver spoon," Keller said. "Daddy King was no little preacher. When your daddy's pastor of the Baptist Church and you're his favorite son, if you want it, you can have it."

But he said King chose to relinquish his opportunity to follow in his father's church and worked instead to make a difference for his race.

"There was something about the tradition that said you've got to do more than make it for yourself that drove him out," he said.

Keller said that during King's youth, black Americans were told they couldn't share in the opportunities afforded whites in education, worship and economics.

"Martin came out of a tradition that made it possible for us when we weren't supposed to do it, to build schools," he said. "When we weren't worshipful enough and they said we couldn't go to church with them, we started our own churches."

Keller said that although King was misunderstood, attacked and jailed, he maintained the "temerity and boldness" to strive to make his dream "a reality."

The minister illustrated his own experience with dreams by relating his youthful fantasies about a woman he thought he would someday marry.

"I thought in my dreams there was no one in the whole world like her," he said.

But one night at a social, Keller said, he "looked up and there coming in the door was someone I'd never dreamed about." That person ended up becoming his wife.

"When the real thing caught me I realized my whole dream had no substance at all, but when I saw the real thing, I pursued it, caught it and kept it until the Lord took her home."

He applied the experience to young black Americans and how they view King's dream of racial and social equality.

"Who's going to take their place?" Keller said. "Who among you is going to stand and say the dream is mine, not just Martin's dream?"

Keller urged students to disregard other's opinions of King and his beliefs. "If what he did and said is significant to me, I don't need you to approve it.

"When we're willing to say, `Yes, I'll take my place,' then our stories will merge yours, his and mine and his dream becomes our dream."