On the 50th anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., America naturally reflects on how much progress it has made in race relations and racial justice since 1968.
There are those who look at the glass as half-empty, and with plenty of justification.
They see a resurgence in white supremacy, the shootings of unarmed black men by police, the disproportionate number of black men in prison, and the persistent economic and educational gaps between whites and blacks as proof of their contention that America has made little progress toward ridding this nation of discrimination.
But those who study history, or have just a good memory, can’t help but conclude that the glass is more like half full.
White supremacy movements may be occasionally violent today, as evidenced by the deadly confrontation last year in Charlottesville, Va., but the level of violence is nowhere close to what it was in 1968 and before.
Back then, the Ku Klux Klan and other similar groups rampantly terrorized blacks and their white sympathizers, often with complicity from law enforcement. Such complicity is nowhere to be found today.
On the day before his assassination, King, then just 39 years old, had a premonition that he might soon be a martyr to the cause of racial and economic justice that he so bravely championed.
Toward the end of his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, he told his predominately black audience in Memphis that he might not be with them when they reached the “Promised Land” of equal treatment and respect in American society, but that he knew it would be reached.
Maybe that Promised Land is still elusive, but America is much closer to it today than it was 50 years ago.
Black people have been elected to office in record numbers, including in states such as Mississippi that resisted racial equality most stubbornly, and at the highest levels. King may have been more visionary than most, but even he would have been hard-pressed to envision a nation that tried continuously to keep blacks from voting during his lifetime would elect a black president during his children’s.
Black people have integrated every workplace and profession and become leaders in many of them. Once all-white neighborhoods, schools and churches have been integrated. Biracial families are becoming commonplace. In short, there is less judgment based on skin color and more on character, just as King called for in his famous 1963 speech.
Where racism sadly persists, at least it’s covert and not wide open and widely condoned, as it once was.
An assassin’s bullet ended King’s life half a century ago, but it did not end the cause for which he died. That cause lives, and it’s got more followers than ever.
