Very often, I’ll hear somebody muse: I wonder what Martin Luther King would have thought about a black man in the White House! As if you would have been at all surprised or amazed or satisfied. I don’t think you would have been any of those things. To imply any kind of amazement would be to imply that you didn’t really believe it would ever happen, and I don’t think you could have lived the life you did without believing that this progress was not just possible but inevitable.
If you were still with us today, I doubt that you would be sitting on a beach somewhere basking in the advancements that have been made, saying, Mission accomplished. Probably your attention would still be focused on the inequalities – racial, economical, religious – that still exist in our society. You’d be at Zuccotti Park and the Gay Pride parade and the ground-zero mosque, and you’d still be marching on Washington to tell even this president of the injustices that exist under his watch. (And the irony of that is that some of the people who called you a troublemaker in the 20th century will just simply call you an ingrate in the 21st. Like, We gave you this, this and this, and you now you want THAT!)
Having lived for three years around the corner from your birth home in Atlanta, around the corner from the Ebenezer Baptist Church and the King Center, I had plenty of opportunity to reflect on your legacy. Thank you for your message of peace, for being a spokesman of equality. I am sorry you had to pay such a heavy price for it. If it’s any consolation, know that when I see the world my children live in, I see a world without racial definition. Each of my daughters has a diverse circle of friends in every shade, from every corner of the world. They see nothing unusual or noble or open-minded about it, it’s not classifiable, the way it was even when I was growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It just is.
For your birthday, I got you three stellar MLK pop-culture references:
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