Staying Awake to King’s Dream

Perhaps inevitably, like Memorial Day or Presidents Day, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is becoming just another holiday, a break from work, a three-day weekend out of town. Even King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is becoming so much Muzak. But remembering other parts of King’s life and work will keep fresh the reasons that our nation honors him.

There will be parades today, and prayers. Some will sing the anthem of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.” Some will meditate on King’s nonviolent fight for full equality . . . the Montgomery bus boycott, the march on Selma, the march on Washington.

King has been dead for nearly as long as he lived. An assassin’s bullet killed him at age 39 in 1968, a year in which he had expanded his crusade against economic inequities and the war in Vietnam.

The progress since then is undeniable. The strides can be measured for African Americans in the huge increase in black voters, black elected officials, black millionaires and black business owners and the lowest rate of black unemployment since records first were kept. More African Americans are completing high school, graduating from college and sharing in the American dream, King’s dream. Yet, more are using drugs and going to prison.

Millions of Americans remain on the bottom of the economic heap in the “abject, deadening poverty” that King decried in his push for economic justice. His crusade embraced not only black Americans but many others, including Latino children, some of whom today in Los Angeles write in Spanish, “Tengo un Sueno”--I have a dream.

During a visit to Los Angeles in 1963, as recounted when Time magazine named him Man of the Year, King finished a talk by saying: “I say good night to you by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher, who said, ‘We ain’t what we ought to be and we ain’t what we’re going to be. But, thank God, we ain’t what we was.”

America is not what it was in King’s heyday, but this nation is also not yet what it should be--free of racial discrimination and economic inequality.