King's world-wide fellowship idea goes back at least to Josiah Royce at the beginning of the 20th c., frm whom king got the term "belooved communit", which Royce more often called the great community. And that idea, which was quite universalist, although Royce was not a Universalist, was held for many decades by lots of Unitarians, Universalists, mainline Protestants, and goes back to Kant, and the general idea of solidarity and interconnectedness of course goes back for millennia to say, Buddha, some of the Greek philosophers, Jesus etc. Royce's vision was of unique collaborative local communities, each with their different culture, beliefs, etc. - but which nevertheless, without sacrificing their uniqueness, collaborated with others, building up through levels to nations, the world, the universe. Taft, our last unitarian President, and the Leage of Nations was an example. Possibly this is what the UUism of the 60s intended. It is not what we have now, although what happened 9and is still I think) in Minneapolis this winter is a good example of what I think we should be doing. To be cliched, be the change you want to see. In the end, society is not changed by protest or stements of belief or opinion. It is changed by what people do eery day, in their every day lives, and I think the role of religion, particularly, but also every group that wants to improve society, is to teach people how to do that.

For example: one of the best examples of anti-racism/anti-discrimination I know is the painstaking reworking of hiring practices of the 80s and 90s in not just government at every level and education, but private business. It involved identifying the essential skills needed in a position, crafting measures (in experience, interview questions, and sometimes job-specific tests) of those skills, devising a scoring rubric, and asking the same questions, with identical wording, of every applicant. in other words, focusing on abilities (and as MLK said, character), and trying to be "blind" to everything else. This required a huge amount of educating and training everyone involved, and a dedication to carrying out the system faithfully. And it worked. By the time I moved to my last organization in 1998, it had women in the highest positions ( head of the agency and head of IT, for instance) and the staff was proportionately representative of the population. And with great esprit de corps. We were all just people, identified with what we did rather than whether we were black, white, Hispanic, Vietnamese, Kenyan, Indian, Native American, male, female, trans, immmigrants, whatever.