On this Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the US, we can look back and see how far we’ve come.
In my personal memory, black people were hung from trees, lynched, simply because they were black.
In my personal memory, people rioted in cities like Benton Harbour, Detroit, and Los Angeles, burning down whole sections of town, to protest their treatment at the hands of the police.
In my personal memory Dr. King was assassinated by James Earl Ray.
In my personal memory, John F. Kennedy was assassinated by persons unknown.
In my personal memory Robert Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan.
In my personal memory, George Wallace was crippled by Arthur Bremmer.
As one lives a life, one sees the specter of racism, grow and then recede, grow again and recede again. Eventually you come to the conclusion that humans have an infinite capacity to hate, as well as an infinite capacity to embrace. I can still hope that we can get there, despite all the evidence to the contrary. What keeps me hopeful is the last paragraph of Dr. King’s I Have A Dream speech:
“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"
RoadDave 