Faith, With Works, Is Alive

By Leslie McGraw

I carry Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with me not as a symbol, but as a witness.

The version of King that shaped my work wasn’t protected by applause or memorials. He was jailed—again and again. He was threatened, surveilled, beaten, and targeted by the state because he organized people to challenge power. Because he refused to separate civil rights from economic justice, militarism, and the criminalization of Black resistance.

Dr. King said plainly, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate.” He understood that injustice survives not only through violence, but through silence and delay.

That truth lives at the Elbert Williams Voting Corner.

My great-grand-uncle, Elbert Williams, spent some of his last hours alive inside a jail cell—despite committing no crime. He was targeted for organizing Black voters and helping to build an NAACP chapter in Brownsville, Tennessee. Like King, he was punished not for wrongdoing, but for believing Black people deserved civic power.

When Dr. King wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he was naming what my family already knew: jails have long been used as tools to suppress democracy.

That’s why, at the Elbert Williams Voting Corner, I center truth-telling, jail and prison reform, and civic education. We do not look away from the harm. We do not sanitize the struggle. We teach history honestly so people understand how power works—and how to challenge it.

Dr. King also reminded us, “The time is always right to do what is right.” This work is not symbolic. It is urgent. It is unfinished. And it is rooted in the belief that democracy only survives when everyday people are informed, protected, and willing to act.

My faith, My Imani, helps me to stay the course.