Unless you knew them personally, it is impossible to wade through the history books, the lies and truths, the conspiracies, and really understand who they were and what they did.
So too is it impossible to separate the figure from their followers, making it even more difficult to understand just exactly who they were and what they personally were like.
I saw this photo on the New York Times website this morning, not even realizing that today marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Photo: Bob Fitch, via the New York Times
I just really was struck by it, and for a moment I was drawn into another world. A world with very little light.
A world we like to think we don't live in anymore.
Who knows what Dr.King would think about our situation today. The United States is fighting the same war it did when he died, albeit in a different place. People of colour are still seeing vastly different standards of living than Caucasian Americans. Civil rights for homosexuals, the disabled and in many ways are still being fought for by many ethnic groups.
Have we changed? Yes. For the better. My generation, at least the people I know from it, are true believers in equality. In many ways I believe I am effectively colour blind, though thanks to some throwbacks from the earliest days of my youth I cannot claim to have never heard a racial slur. But like in all times before us, one feels the great sense that there are still many hurdles to overcome, many changes to be made, many ghosts to be reconciled.
I can never say that Dr.King would embrace my homosexuality, because he existed in a time and place where civil rights focused more on what you were on the outside instead of what you were on the inside. But I can only hope that he would today be a champion for all those whose lives are lived with even the slightest frown or wrinkled nose from 'the majority'.
But I guess truly, we will never know.
3 comments:
I have to believe that Dr. King would have embraced our homosexuality, afterall, one of his top lieutenants, Bayard Rustin, was gay. And his wife, Coretta Scott King, was one of our biggest supporters in the African American community before she passed away.
Race, ethnicity, gender, feminism, sexuality, etc., remain controversial even among the younger generations. We are in an interesting time inhabited by people of older generations who grew up with the ideologies of inequality, the middle generations who saw the conflicts and fought for (or against) equality firsthand, and the younger generations who have only read about the struggles in history class.
The tug of war continues.
History will make of us what it will, the best we can do to influence it is live our lives in the way best befitting to us.
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