{William Cerf's Creativity Journal 

During that very first seminar Dr. Boxill suggested that it would be useful to have a personal North Star to guide one throughout the dissertation process. I was inspired to enter Union and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Specialization as a result of my involvement with the Poverty Initiative and that I had my North Star in place even before I started the Ph.D. adventure. I use it often to keep myself focused on my larger life project, which is to help the poor take action together with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.



My North Star

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The dispossessed of this nation – the poor, both white and Negro – live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize…against the injustice, “not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures” (italics mine) through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life (King 66 - 67).



Work Cited



King, Jr. Martin Luther. The Trumpet of Conscience. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967. Print.