Across America today, citizens will recall and pay homage to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man who embodied the American spirit and American ideals like few others in our nation’s history. Indeed, as we take measure of his life today, one fact should not go unnoticed and unappreciated: So significant was King’s impact on our nation that the United States, a country that began as a slave nation, honors this civil rights leader with one of only two federal holidays celebrated in a person’s name (Columbus Day is the other).
And as we remember King today, here’s one other compliment that we can bestow upon him: Almost 39 years after his death, his life and legacy has been celebrated so often — and by so many — that it’s virtually impossible to find something original to say about the man.
But we’d be remiss to not, at the very least, try …
So we do well to remember one particular lesson of King’s: It is substance, and not mere appearance or other happenstances of birth, that matter. He expressed it best in the familiar line from that wonderful 1963 oration from the steps of the LincolnMemorial we most often remember: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The degree to which we still fail King’s dream is seen in the unforgiving tangle of laws, regulations and procedural traditions by which so much of the opportunity afforded by our nation’s institutions is allocated on the basis of skin color or some other racial, ethnic or gender identification.
Whatever the intent behind that tangle, King would be grieved by it because in that same stirring speech he also warned that “in the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.” Would that our nation’s educators and jurists especially would heed King’s wisdom and return our classrooms and courtrooms to the actual practice of putting character over color and related factors of discrimination.
King spent all of his life trying to eschew labels and transform America’s stereotypes and prejudices into equal respect accorded each man and woman. As our politics turns ever more partisan and polarized, we’d be wise to remember King’s words: “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.” Let us be true to King’s dream today and every day.
