As we look forward to another
Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, celebrate the 150th anniversary of
the Emancipation Proclamation, and prepare to inaugurate our first African
American president to a second term, I'd like to talk about the Civil Rights
Movement and what it meant to my generation.
It was the inspiration for everything
that followed, including the Latino, Asian, peace, women's, student, environmental
and LGBT movements.
Our country is immeasurably better
for all of them, but the Civil Rights Movement was the most important of all because
it tackled America's original sin – the sin of slavery and its successor under
a different name, Jim Crow.
Unlike other immigrants, Africans
didn't come here looking for freedom or opportunity. They were kidnapped and
transported here in slave ships.
As many as half died during the voyage,
but the slavers still made a handsome profit. And if there was a storm, so much
the better: They could simply toss the slaves overboard and get full
reimbursement from the insurance companies for their lost "cargo."
Here in America, the slaves were at
their master's mercy. If he wanted to rape them, kill them or sell their
children, he could. And the government would back him up.
That was supposed to end with the
Civil War, but it didn't. Historians like to say that the North won the war but
the South won the peace.
When I was a kid in the 1950s
segregation was the law of the land, and not just in the South, either. Even liberal Berkeley didn't desegregate
its schools until 1968.
But it was worst in the South.
Working hand-in-hand with the elected authorities, the Ku Klux Klan was
conducting a reign of terror against any African Americans who had the temerity
to ask for their rights.
But, as Dr. King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.
With no weapons to counter the KKK's armed terror, the brave pioneers of the
Civil Rights Movement turned to the only tools they had: marches, sit-ins and
anything else they could think of to hold a mirror up to the country and force
the American people to watch what was being done in their name.
There was a terrible
cost: beatings, bombings, arsons and countless murders. And instead of going
after the Klan, the FBI went after Dr. King, even trying to drive him to
suicide by threatening to reveal evidence of his extra-marital affairs.
But, like the early
Christians, the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church. On
election night 2008, 40 years after Dr. King died, Barack Obama was elected our
first African American president. And I cried tears of joy.
"I can't help it," I explained.
"I've waited so long for this (expletive deleted) to be over."
I was ridiculously naive, of
course. The hateful reaction to Obama's presidency over the last four years
shows that racism is very much alive in America.
But he still won in spite of it.
And that means racism might still be alive but it's far from well, especially
among the younger generation.
So God bless Martin Luther King's
memory. He not only made life better for African Americans, he made my life better,
too.
Thanks, Dr. King.
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