Martin Luther King Jr., who was killed 44 years ago this coming Wednesday, would probably not have been surprised that race has become a contentious part of the discussion of the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida.
The civil rights leader and pastor knew our society’s faults well.
But the night before he died in Memphis, Tenn., he spoke about having seen the promised land -- a land in which the color of people’s skin made no difference in how they were treated.
That is the fundamental promise of the United States to its people -- equal treatment and opportunity.
Dr. King’s uplifting vision would have allowed him not to be too surprised that an African-American man was elected U.S. President in 2008 and is seeking re-election this fall.
He fully understood how good we can be as a people and, at the same time, how awful we can be to each other.
We’re the kind of nation that can rise above prejudice to break new ground in the political world, but we are so often reminded that we’re also a nation that cannot seem to put a sordid chapter of its past completely behind it in the area of race relations.
Dr. King’s belief in non-violence in pursuit of the most significant social change this country has ever experienced was based on faith that justice would ultimately win out over injustice.
Up for vigorous debate is how fast to expect that to happen.
That brings to mind a conversation I had about 10 years ago in Flint with a young African American woman.
We were participating in a day of consciousness-raising, focused on promoting better understanding between races.
The perspectives the two of us brought were as starkly different as our skin color.
I was a white male born in the 1950s who began coming of age during the civil rights protests of the 1960s. I lived in a world that was mostly white (when the news of King’s assassination came on the television, for instance, I did not know who he was).
While I found myself in the middle of two race riots in my Kalamazoo junior high school a few years later, my experience with racial injustice was largely academic. I read about it. I watched it unfold on TV. I didn’t live it.
From my vantage point, I told this young woman that day, it was amazing how much progress we had made as a nation on civil rights issues in a relatively short time.
In my lifetime, Jim Crow laws were banished. The separate-but-equal philosophy that segregated our schools and so much else in our society was discredited. Racial steering in home-buying, apartment-renting and job-seeking was made illegal.
Given that our nation had been battling over these matters for its entire 235 years, I was pleased with the progress because I know that this scale of change is difficult.
But she had a very different view.
This was a young woman, probably in her mid 20s then, who took the changes I rattled off for granted. They were in her rear-view mirror. They were things that had been already accomplished and she expected more.
She grew up in the 1980s and 1990s and she knew that she was still sometimes treated differently because of the color of her skin.
She wasn’t satisfied and she was right not to be.
I think we learned something from each other that day. And that was the whole point, wasn’t it?
In February, I visited the site of King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel for the first time.
It was a moving experience as I thought about the tragedy of losing such a leader in such a violent way.
The facade of the motel looks like it did that day and an extremely impressive National Civil Rights Museum has been built onto the back end of it.
I took the tour of the museum, including the building across street, from which the fatal bullet was fired.
The sense of history and being there was powerful.
As my wife, son and I walked through the exhibits, I was again struck by how much change I have seen in my lifetime. We sat on a bus similar to the one Rosa Parks rode to fame as she refused to give up her seat to a white person. We read the newspaper headlines that traced not only Dr. King’s movement but those of many others as well.
It was haunting to look at the motel balcony and the spot where Dr. King fell.
He was only 39 years old when he died.
Think what he might have done had he been given more years to work on his causes.
Or did it somehow take his death to wake up a nation?
We’ll never know the answer to that, but we should all be able to agree that we aren’t yet in his promised land.
-- Email Paul M. Keep, executive editor of print for MLive Media Group, at email@example.com.