Margaret, Nancy, and I left Nancy’s house in Rockville at 5:30 a.m. and took the Metro down to the Mall in Washington to attend the dedication of the new Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. Wow! What a lot of surprises. First surprise was that we actually were there early enough to get seats. By the time the event began at 8 a.m. there were tens of thousands of people in the area, most of them standing because the chairs were all taken. The crowd was wonderful. People obviously liked being there. The only unruly person we saw was a white man who began shouting derisive, obscene comments when President Obama began speaking. That man had to be carried from the area because he refused to walk out when he was asked to do so. The President didn’t know it had happened because the podium where he delivered his speech was over by the monument. What a shame that for obvious security reasons he couldn’t get close to the great crowd of people who clearly love America and respect their President. Oh, yes, I forgot to mention the second surprise this morning. I’m guessing that white people made up no more than one percent of the crowd of tens of thousands. All the others were people of color, mostly african American.
What can it mean that white people won’t make the effort to participate in a dedication of a monument to Martin Luther King. As I see it, in my lifetime, and perhaps in the history of my country, Dr. King has been the American who consistently came closest to doing what Jesus said we should do with our lives. He recognized the oppression and deprivation of poor people, and especially poor people of color because they were the folks he knew best, and he set about trying to do something about their plight. There seemed to be no meanness in the man. Over and over again he responded to hatred, ridicule, taunts, and threats from individuals and from mobs by saying, “I love you... because God expects me to love you.” He and Gandhi and Nelson Mandela and perhaps some contemporary saints I don’t know because they haven’t been in the public eye understood fully what Jesus tried to teach us to do... to see ourselves in absolutely every other person, even in the people who don’t like us and would hurt us if they could... and to relate to them the way we would like them to relate to us even when they dislike us and want to harm us... so it was a great surprise to me that very few white people attended the dedication of the memorial to Dr. King. I am going to have to try harder to live with an attitude of hope and expectation that Americans can be what Martin Luther King said he believed we can be.
Gwen Ifill, Roland Martin, Rev. Joseph Lowery, Congressman John Lewis, Ambassador Andrew Young, MLK’s 84-year-old sister Christine King Farris, Rev. Al Sharpton, Rev. Bernice King, Martin Luther King III, Violinist Miri Ben-Ari, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Rev. Jessie Jackson, Mary Mary, Jennifer Holiday, The Ebenezer Baptist Church Choir, Shirley Murdock, Rabbi Israel Dresner, Julian Bond, Dan Rather, Nikki Giovanni, Marian Wright Edelman, Cicely Tyson, and many others.
1 comment:
I'm blown away by the white/black ratio attending the event. The photos sure give proof to your claim. I was excited to hear about the new exhibit and can't wait to see it. I never think of the white black thing, I just respect MLK for being a brave and good man. I can't believe the lack of white presence. Does that still speak volumes? Maybe MLK wasn't as successful as he had hoped, judging from the crowd. It's mind boggling to me.
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