“Southern culture, properly considered, actually more or less rules the world.”

This essay was taken from a Martin Luther King Jr. Day address given by the author on January 17, 2005, in Columbus, Mississippi. The author would like to thank everyone on the Columbus Martin Luther King Jr. Legacy Committee, especially Wilbur Colom and Deborah Schumaker of the Colom Foundation. He would also like to thank his wife, Perri Morgan, his sister-in-law Hope Morgan Ward, who is the United Methodist Bishop of Mississippi, and her husband, Mike Ward, who knows a good bowl of butterbeans when he spills it in his lap.