That YouTube link is the MLK I Have a Dream speech made in Washington. I remember it like yesterday which, at times, I wish I did not. I remember seeing King in 1959 leading a protest march down the streets of my home town that coincided with the longest strike in steel industry history for my father and most of my family worked there. One hundred twenty-nine days; oh do I remember that strike. I remember, on my bike, riding to the picket line at the front gate of the huge Republic Steel mill; the largest in the world at that time to get little bottles of chocolate milk as I watched and listened to the strikers. I remember Marlon Brando, Paul Newman and other Hollywood stars coming to Gadsden to support the march and the events that were engulfing my world; a very white world! At ten years old, color really never strikes at your heart until something catastrophic happens.
This is the day set aside to honor Dr. King. For many years, frankly, I felt it a wasted holiday for surely there had to be more deserving reasons to not go to work than that. But as my hair quickly moved from very black to very gray and working all over the world, including South Africa, I was cast in the fire of realizing just what a powerful and unique force King forged. The Freedom Riders blaze through my mind like it was yesterday and that sense of anger and wish to lash out at the "troublemakers" down here, the south, from Yankee land. I remember the dogs in Birmingham and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four little black girls. I think for me that was that moment when all the bells quieted in my very white mind and in the silence I was made to realize, the culture of the South was so wrong and look what it has brought us to! I was sickened at the thought of such mercilessness and waste.
I remember the first time I drove by that Baptist church several years late and I began to cry for no apparent reason other than it had to be at the place where the terrible met with reality. So when you hear about the Freedom Rides, the killings, the colored water fountains, back door entrances to doctor offices for the blacks, Selma and her famous Edmund G. Pettis Bridge I have since walked across myself, etc, etc, it comes to today; nearly fifty years later.
Having beautiful glistening back grand daughter from Ethiopia has been the point of cleansing for me in so many ways. That child is captivating at just over two years old. She loves her Poppy, that would be me. She is loving, funny, engaging, full of life and inquisitiveness. She makes you want to pick her up, kiss her, hug her closely so with each of those physical and emotional events with her, I realize the cleansing of some terrible memories and ideologies of my culture are being washed clean. So Ms. Hope has been that lightning rod of cleaning for this Southern boy and I thank God for that cleansing and for her every day. You realize, at the aggregate, how really stupid and inhumane is this thing called racism and yes, we all are stained with that terrible disease in some way or another.
So I figured I would on this MLK day I would listen to his most famous speech and realize how phenomenal the words of the future were as they are delivered on those steps beneath President Lincoln! I wish you would take a few minutes and watch and really listen to the video.. Nobody could have or would have ever imagined the power of that little man's voice in a world now five decades hence. Is the mess cleaned up? Certainly not but he and his words began a cleansing that is still flowing to this day. I can tell you one that is totally cleansed of the taint of racism and that would be me. Thank you God for bringing Ms. Hope into my world.
No comments:
Post a Comment