Early Morning, April 4

Forty years ago today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, Tenn.

In my lifetime, King has been mythologized as the innocuous peace-monger on whom we did book reports, whose birthday we celebrated as a day off from school or work. It’s worth remembering a time when King was widely thought, even by pro-civil rights Liberals, as a troublesome radical.

Lots of people name King as a martyr for American freedom. Those men and women who firmly believe King was murdered (with the complicity of the FBI) because he told truth to power are largely marginalized are cast as divisive hate-speakers. Those of us assigning those book reports to our elementary school students gloss over King’s indictments of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

This is what I know. I go back to, not 40 years to Dr. King’s murder, but 45 years to his speech at the March on Washington, the speech that stands in the history of American oratory with the Gettysburg Address, when he put forth a dream in which, he said, people would be “judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

I imagine men and women of every race standing in the heat of August on the Mall before the Lincoln Monument, and those watching on TV, listening to Dr. King’s hopeful vision. I imagine them cynical, like me. I imagine them listening to his dream, hoping that it would come true, but knowing in their heart of hearts that freedom would never really come, that things would never really change.

And then I see a biracial man taking the lead in the race for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States. Did the people listening to Dr. King’s speech imagine this would happen in their lifetime? Forty years in the desert.

“My Lord, My God.” In this, I quote a black minister here in Winston-Salem who, this week, I heard say that he was every day re-evaluating his perception of the maturity of America’s white voters, because in voting for Barack Obama we’re proving his cynicism wrong.

My Lord, My God. I pray every day that the citizens of this country that I love more than my life can grow to earn my love. That we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. That we will vote – and live – based on conscience, rather than color. That we will cease to care about such superficialities.

This is one white girl who believes in that vision from the mountain-top.

[For some reason, that line in the U2 song "Pride (In the Name of Love)" ("Early morning, April 4/shot rings out in the Memphis sky/Free at last, they took your life/They could not take your pride") gets the time wrong. King died at 6:01 p.m. What, "Early evening" didn't sound right? They were going on Dublin time? Who knows...]