This time last year, I was assigned to cover an event at Randolph-Macon College.

The college was celebrating the birthday of slain civil-rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by honoring Wyatt Tee Walker, who served as King’s executive assistant and the first full-time executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Randolph-Macon’s president, Robert R. Lindgren, welcomed about 450 people who gathered to pay tribute both to King, who inspired a vision of equality, and Walker, who has worked to make that dream a reality.

Walker said that when he first went to Petersburg as a pastor, he carried a gun, “waiting for a racist to confront me so I could shoot him. It was Martin Luther King who told me to put down my gun.”

When people are afraid or frustrated they may choose to attack.

And they may discover that it is easy to find supporters, to find those who will hand them both a weapon and a reason to use it.

And the chance to join or observe these attacks may seem exciting to some of us, since they may offer a promise of immediate change.

But those passive crowds can be more even more unnerving than the aggressors.

When I have read descriptions of the French Revolution, the most grisly scenes were not of the rioting and the guillotines. The truly chilling images were those of the women who sat there, knitting, throughout the executions.

It is frightening to realize how many people in our history have succumbed to violence.

And it is terrifying to realize how many more people chose to do nothing while they watched that violence reveal itself.

So to put be told to put down a gun, and to make the choice to put it down, seems like the obvious thing to do.  Until you realize how often it doesn’t work out that way.

Heroism, honesty and a quest for change are democratic ideals.

There are many precedents to prove that change does not always linger after the immediate rush of a bullet or a blade.

The celebrations of the birthday of Dr. King and the inauguration of Barack Obama are so thrilling to me, because they prove that grace, and tenacity, truly can triumph.