Column: MLK Day

Note: This column first ran in the Logan (Utah) Herald-Journal on Feb. 4, 1999. Lightly updated, I like to share it with my students every year. Here in Utah, the holiday was finally renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Day (which is wasn’t in 1999), but the state Legislature continues to begin its annual session on this day—which I still find disrespectful. In this 2008 campaign season when a black man is a serious contender for president, Dr. King’s dreams—some coming true, but many still distant—are especially worth revisiting. TP

Three decades years later, King’s dream won’t die

By Ted Pease
© 1999

Normally, I am an incurable optimist. But there are times when I despair for American society—is there any hope for us? Will we ever be able to learn from our past mistakes? This week, remembering the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is one of those times when I'm not so sure.

In spite of social conditions in the 1960s, Martin Luther King had a dream for American equality. He helped the rest of us dream it with him, and made us believe it.

That was more than four decades ago. Dr. King was young—in his 30s—black and incredibly powerful in his faith, his dream, his vision for an America that would correspond to the nation that the Constitution’s framers had also dreamed of.

The dream, said King, was that one day in America, people would be judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Most of the time I truly believe that we Americans have indeed grown that much, to the point where, as a society, race really doesn’t matter, and that our view of others is not—like beauty—just skin-deep.

But I am a white man. For people who aren’t white—more than one-third of all Americans—race matters almost more than any other single thing in their lives. So what do I know?

Here in Utah, about 12 percent of the population is “minority”—that is, not white. We are the 13th whitest state in the Union. I think people here really do try to live up to moral expectations of decency and acceptance in their dealings with others, but in Utah we can’t even celebrate the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and honor the ideals he espoused, worked for, died for. Instead, what is designated as Martin Luther King Day on the federal and national calendar is “Human Rights Day” in Utah, as if we dare not acknowledge the power and vision of a black man. (This changed in 2001. TP)

When I was a kid, my parents loaded me onto a bus and took me into Boston to “march with Martin Luther King.” I’m not sure how old I was, or how well I understood what we were doing with the masses of people moving slowly around the historic Boston Common, making new history in a city not known for its racial acceptance, and singing, over and over, “We Shall Overcome.”

But I have sharp and distinct images from that day that still move me, more than 40 years later. King was there that day, and I remember listening to him speak from the small gazebo on the Boston Common. It wasn’t the “I Have a Dream” speech for which he is most famous, of course—he made that mark on our nation’s history and our culture’s conscience during the famous “March on Washington” on Aug. 28, 1963. I don’t remember his words that day in Boston, but the dream was real in the sound of his voice. Like an unforgettable taste on my tongue, I can still feel his voice and his dream.

It’s not that I have any quarrel with Utah designating a day to honor the precepts of human rights. After all, Martin Luther King Jr., who would have been 79 now had he survived, certainly did stand for human rights for everyone. In fact, let’s declare every day “human rights day” in Utah. But why can’t we as a state honor King himself—if only once a year—and why, if we as a state believe in what King dreamed of, does the Utah Legislature pick that day to open its session and get on with business as usual? What message does that send? It’s disrespectful to King and people of all races who espouse his ideals.

Most of us “just don’t think about race that much,” as one of my students here at Utah State University said to me one day last fall. “Why does it matter?” she said, meaning that a person’s race shouldn’t matter.

Well, she’s right: it shouldn’t matter in the way she meant. Race shouldn’t be a barrier to opportunity, education, lifestyle, expectations, the way we live our day-to-day lives and raise our kids and interact with each other on the street or in schools or at work. But it does matter, and race still is a barrier to people who aren’t white, for whom race is “the single most defining aspect of all parts of my life,” as a black former colleague once told me.

In 2008, four decades after James Earl Ray murdered Martin Luther King, the dream is still alive, but still unfulfilled. Some think America is no less racist and divided now than it was in the 1960s, when a presidential commission said we were “two societies, one white, one black, separate and unequal.”

The reason that race matters today—and not just for people who aren’t white—goes beyond the precepts of basic human decency on which our faith and our beliefs as Americans are founded. It matters because we are still living in two (at least) separate and unequal and largely incommunicative societies where, as Martin Luther King pointed out a generation ago, words still seem to count more than deeds, and skin color is more important than character.