Unlocking Doors of Hope: A Quest for Enduring Peace and Justice

Abstract

More than 50 years ago, a man who dared to dream that the United States of America’s “bank of justice”¹ is solvent became the youngest and the third person of African descent to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.² Approximately 45 years after the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. accepted this award on behalf of the civil rights movement in the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, became “the third sitting United States president to be awarded the peace prize.”³ King dealt with the reality of inequality in a nation that marketed itself in 1964 as “the land of the free and the home of the brave”—a land where black people, poor people of all ethnicities, and women were denied basic liberties and rarely beneficiaries of often undisclosed legacy policies⁴ that granted access to a select few that exacerbated disparities in education, employment, and housing.