Our View: Where is the dream?
Today the nation celebrates the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the great civil rights leader from the 1960s who led peaceful protests and demonstrations to bring down Jim Crow laws and state sanctioned segregation. His famous “I Had a Dream” speech painted a vision of a nation where, someday, all men and women would treat each other as equals, judging each other by the “content of their character and not the color of their skins.”
Today it seems we are no nearer that vision than when he made that speech. In fact there are indications we are drifting farther away.
We are a nation with a great economic gap between minorities and whites in income and employment. Our educators are struggling to close an achievement gap between poor minority students and whites. Politically, we have gone from electing our first black president eight years ago to one who started his campaign by categorizing illegal Mexican immigrants as rapists, murderers and drug dealers.
On this Martin Luther King Day holiday, we can pause and reflect on this trend. We can recall the words of Martin Luther King on that day in 1963, look them up on the internet, listen to it on YouTube. We can resolve to keep the dream alive in our own hearts, and in the nation’s.
COMMENTS