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Look around at our nation's progress on race Precisely 40 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. gave one of the most revered speeches in U.S. history; the one in Washington, under Lincoln's gaze, in which he said, "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." Goodness, how time doth fly, how close to miracles we've come, and how gratitude -- particularly by people like me -- is commanded. Estimates vary, but upwards of 400,000 people, about a third of whom were white, may have gathered at the waters of the Lincoln Memorial for what was officially called a "March for Jobs and Freedom." According to stories in the old Minneapolis Tribune, Minnesota was represented by about a hundred participants, including former Gov. Harold Stassen, a Republican, and then-Minneapolis Mayor Arthur Naftalin, a DFLer. Richard Wilson, chief of the Tribune's Washington bureau, wrote of how the demonstration was "more like a religious procession than a parade, subdued and accompanied by spirituals." The description was important insofar as many had feared violence, with President John Kennedy actually urging King and other leaders to cancel the event. I was 15 back then, and while I certainly recall the march itself and the controversy that led up to it, for some reason I better remember the outlines of an absurd segment of the "Today" show that aired around that time. A couple of in-studio guests, including a white man (who might have been a Southern senator) and a black man (who might have been Jackie Robinson) were debating the wisdom of the protest specifically and matters of American equality more broadly. Keep in mind, this was a year before passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and two years before the 1965 Voting Rights Act; Jim Crow still ruled in many places. The white guy didn't think spit of the march, but when it came to how African-Americans were faring generally, he contended they were doing pretty OK. Exactly how and why were blacks supposedly doing satisfactorily, and why was a big get-together in Washington unnecessary? Because, he continued, they had come to own more refrigerators per capita than they used to. I trust he offered additional evidence to back up his claim, but for some reason, it was his refrigerator datum that has remained frozen in the part of my skull charged with preserving only the ripest of the ripe. One of the arguments made by activists during the 1950s and '60s was that racial equality would free not only blacks, but everyone. This surely proved to be the case for the South as a region, given its subsequent renaissance. But it's similarly true that the civil rights movement of mid-century lowered the likelihood of white folks contorting themselves into blithering fools, as did the talking head on the "Today" show who testified -- not to the glorious, if fogged-in, promise of our society and ship of state, as King did -- but to an armada of Amanas. Personally, my family owes extra thanks to those who risked body and fortune, though never conscience or soul, for freedom. As I've written before, my wife Diane and I adopted a biracial girl, Nicole, almost seven years ago, when she was 5. This has caused me to be exquisitely alert to questions of how she is treated and judged: by the color of her summer-bronzed skin or the content of her exuberantly adolescent character? Best I can figure, the news here has been perfectly wonderful; King is smiling. It's sadly true that much of what passes for a "civil rights" movement these days is no such thing, as far too much attention is routinely paid to manufactured complexities of complexion in political, educational and several other arenas. But the overriding and better news is that in more intimate, face-to-face realms, we've become a much more comfortable and colorblind palette of people than perhaps King himself thought possible at this stage. If you're skeptical, just park yourself on a bench at the Mall of America some Saturday afternoon and watch the combinations of families and permutations of friends stroll by. We may not have reached the mountaintop that King spoke of five years after his "I Have a Dream" invocation, hours before he was murdered in Memphis, but we've hiked miles higher than we usually give ourselves credit for. For this and other victories, my thanks reach both back and heavenward. -- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis. |