For Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I watched the movie The Great Debaters with our children.  It’s about the debate team at Texas’s Wily College in the 1930s in a segregated South.  Based on a true story, this Black debate team, in a precedent setting event, debated Harvard’s debate team, and won.  The debate topic at Harvard (at least in the movie) was on the pros and cons of civil disobedience, something Dr. King used quite effectively…  In our travels, we have traced the “Voting Rights March” from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  We looked at Black (and White) rural poverty in the Black Belt region of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.  We moved into the inner city of Cleveland to look at, and help impact, Black inner city poverty, something Dr. King was also quite outspoken about.  Toward the end of his life, Dr. King had moved his family to the projects in Chicago to focus attention on this poverty.  Note:  While back in Cleveland recently, a friend of mine, Dan Dragony, and I went to Mom’s Restaurant in a hardscrabble area of the city.  It was clean and kind of homey, had an old black and white picture of the Cleveland Indians, and the food was not only good, it was relatively inexpensive.  It is these old ‘Mom’ and Pop restaurants that used to be the hubs of our neighborhoods (before the McDonald’s, Burger King phenomenon). And it’s my belief they should be again.