Today is Dr. King's birthday, and now, in this bizarre and berserk world, it is especially important that we remember him.
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is at the top of the list of people I deeply wish I had met. He was a man of God, a man of peace, and a man of the people. He dedicated his life to them, served them, and died for them. In a restless and divisive time he spoke peace to violence and brotherhood to hate. We were slow to learn.
In the week following his death more than 100 American cities were wracked by major riots in the so-called Holy Week Uprising. Thousands of buildings were destroyed and $65 million dollars--nearly $500M today--of damage done. Baltimore, Detroit, and other cities still bear the scars.
Even I can't say they were unjustified. It wasn't just an outpouring of grief. For Black communities across the country it was the last straw. They had been ignored, persecuted, cheated, brutalized, and robbed by whites for generations, and the reckoning had finally come. The nationwide violence was like nothing seen before or since in this country.
The government's predictable response was to militarize police departments, leading to more decades of racial tension. Since 2016 we have suffered setbacks to laws and programs meant to protect minorities, and on January 6 we were forcibly reminded of the anger and hate still held by many whites in this country.
But we are learning, if slowly. The unrest that followed the deaths of Black people at the hands of police in 2020 was nothing compared to 1968. The 10,000 mostly Black people who gathered in Houston to mourn the death of George Floyd did so peacefully and with respect for the memory of the man murdered by Minneapolis police.
The rise of Black Lives Matter has been an important step, but it can flourish only if it focuses on racial harmony. The ball is in the whites' court.
The United States is today not just divided, but fractured. We desperately need a person with the strength, humanity, fairness, and sheer goodness of Dr. King.