Transcending race

I was out on the road in one of our library trucks this morning with a co-worker who was listening to a black radio station out of Cleveland and their morning talk show was commemorating the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. today. Well, one of their guests was apparently a confidant of King named Clarence Jones and he was saying that the rather incendiary speech by Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was no different from the kinds of things that Dr. King was saying in his time. Well, perhaps the sentiment, but not in the same kind of language that Wright was using. Sure, King could be angry, but in a way so eloquent as to make you pay attention. For example, compare Wright's speech with King's on the frustration with how America deals with war and poor people. First, King's words, regarding his moving toward the anti-war movement for what its cost was to civil rights: "My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, "What about Vietnam?" They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent." Now, compare that with Wright's angry denunciation of our country: "The government gives them [African Americans] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

Frankly, I think that Dr. King spoke in a very different tone than did Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Had King uttered words like those that Wright did, it would have shocked and dismayed people and turned a lot of them off of King's mission, particularly white people. King seemed to want to transcend racial issues and unite all people behind a common cause. He wasn't just fighting for justice for black people, he was fighting for justice for all of America's disenfranchised people, white, black or otherwise. Even as early as his famous "I have a dream" speech, he ended it by saying, "When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" Here he invoked the ideals of people of all races and creeds coming together to work for a common cause of peace, justice and liberty for all, not just his own people, but all people, regardless of who they are or where they come from. So even early on, King transcended race, creed and color and asked us all to work together to get over the differences that separate us. These, in my opinion, are timely words even for today. And it's this kind of thing that I hear coming out of Barack Obama, the desire to put aside our differences - race, creed, color, nationality, language, etc. and come together to mend and heal our country from 8 years of divisive politics. Sure, we need an honest discussion of race in this country, and Obama opened that up with his now famous speech, "A More Perfect Union". I consider that to be a very brave act on his part and I commend him for doing so. It's time for us to find what things we have in common rather than what differentiates us. This is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was trying to tell us so long ago, and sadly, it's a lesson we have not yet learned. May we honor his memory this day by re-committing ourselves to continuing the work he left unfinished by his untimely death, to not only work together to transcend our differences, but to bring about a peaceful world and end unnecessary war forever.