Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to America 60 years ago this week. Watch the 17-minute speech from this link and read the transcript here.
I’m a 73-year-old white man who started high school in 1963. I do not remember watching, reading, or talking with anyone about this event. Not a word by my parents, teachers, or friends. Nor do I recall a class discussion about the civil rights movement at any point in the four years of high school.
From 1967 to 1971, I attended St. Ambrose, a small Catholic liberal arts college in my hometown of Davenport, Iowa. Everything changed. Many of my religion, philosophy, sociology, and history teachers brought civil rights into my life. A young professor took us to Chicago one Saturday morning to attend Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket. Muhammad Ali, unable to fight because he refused induction into the army, spoke to us in our school’s chapel.
John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, darkened his skin with medication and traveled throughout the South as a black man. He wrote about his experiences in Black Like Me and lectured about this in the St. Ambrose student union.
And Keith Fernsler, a sociology professor, assigned King’s dream speech.
Drip by drip, my eyes were opened. You might even say I was awakened to what it was like to be Black in America.
I have never recovered from that experience.
Being woke is about being alive to the lives of others.
I did not stop loving my country when I discovered its flaws any more than I stopped loving my parents when I began to see their imperfections.
Today, I find it impossible not to seek out the voices of those on the margins of our societies.
The margins in a Democracy ought to be thin places. Hard to see.
Walking through life with eyes open is the only way to see them.
Listen to Martin’s timeless message.
There is nothing to fear.
Only one American urging us toward the better angels of our nature.
