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KING of KINGS

Having been born the same year as Martin Luther King, Jr., I have a clear perspective of the America he attempted to change. It was an America divided by color and hostile to the 10% of its citizens who had been forced to the margins of society. There was a Mason-Dixon line, which southern part thereof was most honest in its racial relations. It carefully spelled out every facet of its extensive demarcations. The North was duplicitous. It feigned equality, while constructing an invisible barrier at every point. (Some of those barriers still exist. I cite the private club in Philadelphia that recently contracted the use of its swimming pool to an organization of unseen children, only to be horrified by the unseemly display of melanin when the children finally arrived.) The rest of the contiguous U. S. states ,and where ever else Old Glory reigned, followed suit. 

Until Pres. Harry Truman intervened in 1948, all of the armed services were a model of strict racial segregation. Actually,not that strict: white officers were assigned to run heard over the “immature” Colored troops. With certain reticence, Dr. King was drawn to the helm of a movement that was ripe for someone of his abilities, training and passion. He was aware that Mohandas Gandhi, whose followers outnumbered their oppressors, utilized pacific measures to oust the British. Thus, he adopted that model for the United States, where the proportions greatly were more inverted than with Gandhi, peaceful activism was interpreted as weakness. That strange and frightening tactic was met with the violence which ended his life.

Today, nature and the island of Hispaniola remind us of how the excesses of the New World, in complicity with the Old World, raped a continent for its selfish purposes. We are fortunate for the services of a King who was well-suited to help set right the evil posterity imposed upon the world by the “Divine Right” of a host of other kings.