Editor's note: Friday marked the 46th anniversary of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was slain in Memphis as he continued his civil rights work.
As a young white boy, living in the 50's and 60's in a small Kansas farming town where no black person lived, I was unaware and blissfully ignorant of the racial issues of the country.
As the news on the little black-and-white television in my grandmother's house began to tell of the desegregation struggle in the South, we discussed what was happening around our dinner table. My parents supported the marchers, assuming, of course, that reported justification for their actions was true. They did not know. They lived in the sheltered confines of our small community. Having never seen their interaction with African-Americans, I don't know even now what their true feelings were. After a move to a New Mexico city with a vibrant black community, I remember the pleasure experienced by my father in worshiping with a black congregation. He found their happy praise and exuberance intoxicating – a living example of joyfulness.
So, when Dr. King was spending his time in jail in Birmingham, "alone in a narrow cell" with nothing to do but "write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers," I was living my white life in the small Kansas town, unaware. The "black folks'" struggle was distant and did not touch us there. I did not understand.
My first real exposure, the rubbing of shoulders and face-to-face conversation with black people, occurred while training in the Army during the Vietnam War. I must admit, initially at least, it was not pleasant for me. There was a different cultural view of things, a different approach to expression, even a different language to some degree. It was unsettling. I did not understand why reactions and actions on both sides of the issue were as they were. The Army training experience is probably by definition not a good place to develop thoughtful views of people of other histories, economic influences and cultural mores. I only finally understood the impact of segregation, even then only in an indirect and smallish way, when a black buddy in my training company returned from Christmas leave. He had traveled from Georgia to St. Louis and reported, even in the early 1970's, being refused service in a restaurant by being ignored. I found that difficult to fathom, impossible to explain. His story made me ashamed.
Although I am sure Northwest Arkansas is not an accurate exemplar of past or present Southern racial relationships, my 12 years here have enlightened me a bit. I have seen some of the racial stereotyping previously heard about from the deeper South (and regions of the North as well), and have been given unexpected explanations and defenses of past actions and practices. I am less naïve now.
These thoughts and memories surfaced recently while reading an emailed article by Kellie Cummings, from a Huffington Post item (not a publication I would normally touch). She reported on a panel discussion on Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter From Birmingham City Jail." I'm not sure I had ever heard of this letter before, and certainly I had never read it. It was worth the investment of time. I recommend it to any person interested in justice and freedom.
Whether you are a liberal or a conservative, a Tea Partier or a left-winger, it points to principles I pray we all have in common. It's how we achieve those ideals – through values and conduct taught, learned and lived or by direction, requirement and legislation – that is important. The best pathway is the conundrum of today's society. Whether we "want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes," or bring about genuine change welled up from the foundation stones of ordered and free society we have long recognized -- honesty, work, self-reliance, charity, forgiveness, patience, compromise, faith, selflessness – is the great question of our time. Sadly, we see few of those values exampled in our national leadership today. We seem wholly focused on treating the symptoms and not the disease.
You should read this letter. It takes a while. Like Jonathan Edwards' sermons, it is lengthy. Find a quiet unhurried place and pore through it carefully, savoring the words and images, listening to its message: We are all God's children, every one of us.
Commentary on 04/05/2014