Dream of the King

Today in the United States we celebrate the life of the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I remember in elementary school they would gives us Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. portraits we could color with the 35 brown crayons they distributed. As many of us may know already, Hillary Clinton was recently criticized for her suggestion that president Lyndon B. Johnson helped to make Dr. King's dream a reality with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While I am a republican proponent of Clinton (on most issues) I do have to disagree with her on this subject.

While I was on the Equality Ride, my friend Robin Reynolds presented a valuable question: What stopped lynching? Was it Lyndon B. Johnson? Was it the Civil Rights Act of 1964? No. No. And no. What stopped lynching was the fact that it became wrong and inhumane to do such a thing. It required the change of hearts and minds to come to the realization that dehumanizing and murdering another human being because of the color of their skin was unacceptable and wrong.

We owe these understandings to the work of Dr. King and many other civil rights leaders. Sure, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 contributed a little bit, but it the end it became a change of hearts that stopped lynching.

40 years later though....is Dr. King's dream still being heard? Are we living in a country where

"all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"

We are in a decade of new oppression and new injustices, but in the words of the King family: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice every where."