Dream team

On this MLK holiday

AS A president named Coolidge once said, the business of America is business. So there’ll be sales galore today. Just like on Presidents Day. Or Labor Day. Give them a happy ending—and a three-day weekend!—every time. Better yet, a four-day weekend and a Black Friday before Thanksgiving for all that Christmas shopping.

So the country will officially celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday come Monday. But his birthday is today, on Jan. 15. Those who are familiar with this column know we celebrate Lincoln’s birthday on his birthday. Same with Washington. And we’ll continue to recognize Dr. King’s birthday on a Saturday when we have to. It seems more real.

It’s been about a dozen years ago, but we remember when a commentator of note—you know him as

Juan Williams of Fox News—came to Little Rock to talk to a gathering of inky wretches. What is the collective noun for a group of editorial writers? A clatter? A complaint?

Mr. Williams, always graceful and insightful, gave his entire speech from Martin Luther King Jr.’s point of view: Would the man, the preacher, be proud of modern America? Or would he cry instead? Juan Williams’ thesis: How does the dream fare today?

It’s a question many of us, unfortunately, ask every Jan. 15, MLK’s birthday. “Unfortunately” because such questions shouldn’t be limited to one day on the calendar.

As Juan Williams told it, the preacher from Georgia would have been thrilled, doubtless, with many things. Remember, he lived in a world in which not just private golf courses and motels could refuse Black people, but government(s) actively worked to discriminate, too. Politicians were elected for promising to stand in the schoolhouse door.

Today, if there is still a Whites Only water fountain sign, it’s in a civil rights museum, used as a teaching tool to show the kids that, no, their teachers aren’t kidding about life in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. These things happened. As hard as that is to believe.

Martin Luther King would be amazed at the faces in Congress. And the portraits hanging in the White House of past American presidents. And the front pages of newspapers today, which often include a photo of the vice president of the United States.

Some of us think he’d be amazed to walk into a pizza joint in modern America, and what he would see there. People of all hues sitting together, eating together, living together, being together, growing old together.

And, as Juan Williams told us that day, Rev. King probably would be disappointed about how things are going in other spheres of human endeavor. As in education, crime, housing, and other undertakings of his people, which is all of us.

It’s doubtful that Rev. Martin Luther King would announce Game Over when it comes to the progress he envisioned. Dr. King’s horizons were broader than politics, his understanding deeper than just the color of things. He went to their essence. And like other prophets, he’d see—whatever progress we’ve made—that we are still being weighed in the balance. And too often we’re found wanting.

SOME OF US prefer “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as the quintessential communication from Martin Luther King. (We like the written word.) Then again, his most famous effort was doubtless the “I Have a Dream” speech. So how does the dream stand today?

“The sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.”

What would he say about the current state of American freedom? Certainly there are more political freedoms than in his time. And not just among the different races, whatever “race” might mean today. But only the most naive, or dishonest, would allow that that struggle has been completely won.

Freedom and equality, he said. How many thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people— Black, white, in between— have lost their freedom to prison? And to the life of crime and addiction that led them there? Or have been relegated to living without a decent education, and therefore job, home and future?

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

Now there we feel confident that the dream is being made into reality. Maybe not “mission accomplished,” but there is no doubt that such thoughts are no longer just dreams.

“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.”

There again, getting closer every day, brother.

“This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. 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. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.”

We aren’t as close as Rev. King would have preferred on that last point. We have not yet hewn a stone of hope out of the mountain of despair. Our faces are set Zion-ward, most of us. But … .

As they say in churches today, He isn’t finished with us yet. But we like to think He’s made progress.

IT DOESN’T take much imagination to think that if Rev. King looked at a newspaper today, he could find many ways to be disappointed. It also doesn’t take much imagination to think, in many ways, his dream gets closer to becoming reality with every passing year. To declare Nothing’s Changed is as mistaken as to say we’ve finished. But one day we will get there. As long as there are people like Martin Luther King to lead us. And there always seem to be.

“And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to 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!”

Emphasis on “at last.” Because when we finally get there, it will have been a long time coming.

But the direction is right. And the wind is at our backs.