Rev. King's words ring just as true in today's world
http://www.suntimes.com/news/cepeda/1996240,CST-EDT-esther18.article
January 18, 2010
BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA
My favorite Martin Luther King Jr. Day memory: Each year, the spring semester at my beloved alma mater, Southern Illinois University, began on the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And each year, I played out the same ritual of leaving home.
On the morning of MLK Day, I'd finish packing my tan '84 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with a healthy supply of clean laundry and junk food, kiss Mama and Papa Cepeda goodbye, and take off on a six-hour odyssey down Interstate 57 back to school in Carbondale.
As the Kankakee exits blew by on this particular MLK Day in 1993, I was in a car full of fellow simultaneously reluctant and excited back-to-schoolers. Having switched from driver to navigator, my chief duty was to kill an hour by entertaining the driver with tales from the newspaper.
I lovingly orated the full speech, reprinted in that day's Sun-Times, being sure to inhale before "Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends" so that the phrase would be properly articulated. I moved gingerly through the "I have a dream" sections so as not to caricature King's iconic delivery, bit back the overwhelming desire to sing the snippet of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" he quotes, and ended the "Free at last" proclamation in a near whisper as if in prayer, given that the federal holiday was as much a commemoration of his violent death as it was a celebration of his peace-inspiring life.
The memory of reading those words aloud still gives me the chills!
That was almost 16 years to the day before the first black president would be inaugurated.
Back then, I was a marvelously innocent 18-year-old who had never even given consideration to the idea that King's national civil rights push was every bit as much for me -- a female, ethnic minority -- as for the descendents of slavery.
All those connections were yet to be made during subsequent college courses, but let's just say I got a firsthand inkling of the very real oppression blacks experienced in this country during King's time when that next summer, at a fair in a tiny town even deeper in southern Illinois, I came across my first glimpse of white supremacists.
A vendor sitting at a table next to the corn-dog shack was hawking Ku Klux Klan lapel pins, Nazi swastika ball caps and T-shirts with racist epithets too crass to repeat here. Seeing him in all his army-helmeted, skull-tattooed glory made me wonder -- in a typical fit of naivete -- if there were other people in the world who didn't like people who were not white. I'd never met any before that time, so how could I have known they actually existed outside of dusty history books?
Fast-forward to 2010, an African American is the leader of the same U.S. of A. that imported slaves to help build the country, yet first lady Michelle Obama still has to explicitly explain to people -- reacting to this latest Harry Reid racial comment dustup -- that the existence of a black president would not heal all our race-related ills. Who could have blamed us for hoping so?
It doesn't matter. King gave us 21st century advice good for a post-racial, peace-filled, poverty-cured world we haven't quite attained -- yet. Advice aimed at "black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics" that was never guaranteed to be easy or fun, but necessary:
"As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."
Happy Martin Luther King day. We always lost golden time and man but unfortunately we can't realized that. Let us try to be another one. Let us Salute to KING.
Posted by: DrKeithCurrie | January 19, 2010 at 07:29 AM
i like it
Posted by: john viramontes | January 18, 2010 at 09:01 PM