Bruce Springsteen pays tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. on holiday: The arc of justice

The Boss salutes the King.

Bruce Springsteen paid homage to the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, Jan. 15, King's national holiday.

Springsteen's social media shared a performance of “We Shall Overcome” by the Boss and his Seegar Sessions Band at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival in 2006. The gospel song is closely associated with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and specifically King himself. Folk singer Pete Seeger played it for King after his speech Sept. 2, 1957, at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

It was the first time King had heard it.

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“There’s something about that song that haunts you,” said King after hearing it, according to Kennedy-Center.org.

“There’s the beautiful quote by Dr. King that says the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” said Springsteen on Monday. “I’ve lived long enough to see that in action and to put some faith in it … I’ve also lived long enough to know that arc doesn’t bend on its own. It needs all of us leaning on it, nudging it in the right direction day after day.”

King and Springsteen have something in common -- they both appeared at the former Monmouth College in West Long Branch , now Monmouth University, in front of thousands more than 50 years ago. Springsteen's former bands, Child and Steel Mill, played several shows on the lawn of the Great Hall and elsewhere on campus in the late ’60s and early ’70s. In 1966, King spoke to an assembly of more than 2,000 students at Alumni Memorial Gymnasium, now Boylan Gymnasium, at the college.

“Now, it's a fact that we've come a long, long way but it doesn't hold truth,” said King at Monmouth College, according to the Asbury Park Press. “And I'm afraid if I stop at this point, I will leave you the victims of a dangerous optimism. If I stop here, I will send us away the victims of an illusion wrapped in superficiality. So, in order to tell the truth, it is necessary to move on and not only talk about the fact that we've come a long, long way but to make it powerfully clear that we still have a long, long way to go before the ideal of integration is a reality.”

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King was also a former resident of New Jersey. He lived at 753 Walnut St. in Camden as a young seminarian at the Crozer Theological Seminary in the 1950s.

King, 39, was assassinated April 4, 1968 on a balcony outside his second-floor room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. President Ronald Reagan signed the King Holiday Bill into law in 1983. It designated the third Monday in January a federal holiday in observance of King.

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Chris Jordan, a Jersey Shore native, covers entertainment and features for the USA Today Network New Jersey. Contact him at @chrisfhjordan; [email protected]

This article originally appeared on Asbury Park Press: Bruce Springsteen pays tribute on Martin Luther King Jr. Day