46 Years

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Every year on this day, we sit and watch Dr. King’s “I Have Dream” speech. My kids just don’t quite “get” why it is that I get so choked up over this speech, and nor do they fully understand why we consider it so important that they watch it every year. Although we’ve read and talked about the civil rights movement with them, the concept of segregation is so completely foreign and surreal to them, and for that, I am grateful.

I wasn’t even born until a full three years after Dr. King’s assassination, and so by the time I began to be conscious of the world around me, changes were already happening. My classmates and friends and the other people of my world were of every color and orientation. I grew up in the seventies, with Marlo Thomas and “Free to Be You and Me” and black and white and Latino kids holding hands and scampering across the screen on Sesame Street. But still, I recall little glimpses into the ugliness of racism, here and there… like the uproar over school bussing when I was a child, when I heard parents complaining that they didn’t want their kids going to school with “blacks”. And when my step-father came into our lives…by far one of the most racist human beings I’ve ever met…and I heard him continually making judgments based upon people’s complexion or accent. Oddly (and, quite disturbingly), he was always treated in sort of an “Archie Bunker” sort of way, like that somehow his bigotry was just a little personality quirk. “Oh James” my mother would say, and shake her head.

My kids, thank goodness, are even further removed from that. Our own extended family is multiracial, as are many of the other families we know. They’ve been to as many gay weddings as they have straight weddings. They understand that people come in all shapes and sizes and colors and abilities. Their world is one where people are not judged by their appearance.

Tomorrow, less than 46 years after Dr. King made his famous speech at the March on Washington, we will watch the inauguration of our nation’s first African American President. And while Dr. King’s dream has certainly not yet been fully realized, Obama’s presidency is one more small step toward that dream.