That’s the one-word poem Nicole M. Ford-Francis wrote about her 22-year-old son who died of a heroin overdose — and on Monday at a NAACP luncheon for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, she spoke publicly about her loss for the first time.
“The one thing [King] couldn’t stand was lukewarm people,” said Ford-Francis, founder of the Baltimore-based think tank Visionary Policy Institute, in her impassioned appeal titled, “Don’t Give Up the Fight and Never Cease to Write.”
“So I made a choice this morning not to be lukewarm,” she said Monday, noting that more people have died from opioids in a year than from the Vietnam War.