Martin Luther King Jr. Day, thoughts and reflections

Isabel Wilkerson, in her book, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents makes the poignant commentary that it will not be until the year 2111 that the land upon which the United States sits will have existed without slavery for equal years as it did with the horrors of slavery.

With that reality in mind, it is not surprising that Martin Luther King, Jr was born just 64 years after the end of the Civil War and into the Jim Crow system of Segregation that traversed the Southern states after the end of Reconstruction.

King, who in his famous “letter from a Birmingham jail” noted “History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily” not only spent his life fighting against the structures and outgrowths of white supremacy but also lost his life (as so many others have) to an assassins bullet aimed at keeping those very evils in place.

We stand today, a little over half a century later, in the shadow of the movement he led with many aspects of progress that can be pointed to. Those realities should be celebrated, protected, cherished, and expanded upon.

We also stand in the canyon of dreams not fulfilled, which is something I am hopeful we can all reflect upon today, especially in light of all that we have borne witness to in the last 12 months. Do we take this as a moment to read another reminder that this man existed and did all he did before moving on with the rest of our day/month/year followed by another repeat thereof next year? Or do we take it as a moment to analyze exactly where we stand in regards to the struggle of the Civil Rights Movement.

King stated in his famous “I have a dream speech” that “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir” but that “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.”

Today, we see that the hopes of school integration put forth in Brown remain stalled in percentages that are depressingly identical to what should be a bygone era. Today we see that the gap of home ownership between white and Black households is greater than it was at the time the Fair Housing Act was signed. And today, we see the K recovery impacting communities of color at vastly disproportionate levels in regards to unemployment, fears of eviction, and more. Additionally, the pain of Covid has also had a terrible correlation dependent upon skin color.

There is so much left undone. We have great strides left to make if we are to honor the life that King and so many millions who marched and organized with him led. Hundreds of years were spent constructing and upholding the concepts of white supremacy — there is no doubt that a strong commitment building upon the work of King and his compatriots will be needed on the part of all of those desiring a more just world to truly shatter those concepts for good.

But we are fortunate — as history is ever being written each and every day. And we are fortunate because each one of those days offers an ability to move forward in a fashion akin to the ideals and dreams of the millions of people who marched decades ago.

So today, let’s commit ourselves not just to reading the words of this man who rises as one of the heroes of history but to enacting the vision for which he died. Let us commit ourselves to ensuring that the statistics so often cited actually change for good and that the structures that produce them are finally and completely altered and eradicated allowing for true racial equality. For there is something else that King often cited, which is the “fierce urgency of now” and there is no time, no day, no month, and no year better to make that commitment a reality other than today.