TGR carries the final post in my series on MLK’s talk to Barratt Junior High, which culminates in his famous image of a street sweeper who sweeps his street like Shakespeare wrote poetry and like Beethoven composed concertos:

The street sweeper who sweeps with sufficient excellence may become an equal to Shakespeare, but we will never see this within the limited scope of the present. All we see in the present is a person of low social and economic status, doing a “menial” job.

To see the street sweeper’s dignity, we must see it from a viewpoint outside history…

For Shakespeare and Beethoven themselves, not the mostly-fictional characters whom we imagine in our heads but the actual men, living and breathing in their physical bodies, will be there when God pronounces “well done” over every faithful street sweeper and ditch digger and truck driver in history.

And Shakespeare may well say, “I only wish I could have written Hamlet as well as he swept that street.”

Have a thought about that? Write your comment like Michaelangelo painted pictures!