Tweet
Today our markets are closed on a holiday to honor Martin Luther King. It is most appropriate as I am sure most everyone will agree.
I grew up in Alabama, a bastion of ignorance that I would put down there with Mississippi, about 50 miles from Montgomery. I think I was about a sophomore in high school when Little Rock was desegrated and a freshman when the bus boycott occurred in Montgomery. From then on for a long time there was a lot of open racial hatred in the South and perhaps all across America.
When I was a freshman in dental school Bull Connor was loosing dogs and fire hoses on black demonstrators in Birmingham. Then there were the Selma Marches to Montgomery, and the Sunday morning bombing of a black church not blocks from where I was working in a blood bank. There was a lot of bad stuff and these are just minor recollections of things that occurred in some proximity to where I was.
It was a sad day for America when MLK was assinated in Memphis. And it took more than a few years, as I recall, before the notion of a holiday in honor of King became a national fact.
There is no doubt I was fortunate to live when King did and to benefit probably in ways I can never appreciate from his approach to non-violent civil disobedience. It led to resolution of a terrible moral wrong that whites in American had committed on blacks. King's approach and thankfully success in beginning to rectify these moral injustices no doubt saved America the cost of many lives of blacks and whites and untold destruction of properties. As bad as things ever got, and in many respects they got absolutely terrible, I believe had it not been for King, what we experienced would have been just the tip of an iceberg.
Once again, and this is trite, King saved us again, today, for at least a day.
With tears in my eyes and sadness in my heart, I salute the good works of Martin Luther King.
I grew up in Alabama, a bastion of ignorance that I would put down there with Mississippi, about 50 miles from Montgomery. I think I was about a sophomore in high school when Little Rock was desegrated and a freshman when the bus boycott occurred in Montgomery. From then on for a long time there was a lot of open racial hatred in the South and perhaps all across America.
When I was a freshman in dental school Bull Connor was loosing dogs and fire hoses on black demonstrators in Birmingham. Then there were the Selma Marches to Montgomery, and the Sunday morning bombing of a black church not blocks from where I was working in a blood bank. There was a lot of bad stuff and these are just minor recollections of things that occurred in some proximity to where I was.
It was a sad day for America when MLK was assinated in Memphis. And it took more than a few years, as I recall, before the notion of a holiday in honor of King became a national fact.
There is no doubt I was fortunate to live when King did and to benefit probably in ways I can never appreciate from his approach to non-violent civil disobedience. It led to resolution of a terrible moral wrong that whites in American had committed on blacks. King's approach and thankfully success in beginning to rectify these moral injustices no doubt saved America the cost of many lives of blacks and whites and untold destruction of properties. As bad as things ever got, and in many respects they got absolutely terrible, I believe had it not been for King, what we experienced would have been just the tip of an iceberg.
Once again, and this is trite, King saved us again, today, for at least a day.
With tears in my eyes and sadness in my heart, I salute the good works of Martin Luther King.
Comment