![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Almost 50 years.....
Aug. 18th, 2013 05:17 pmWe're 10 days from the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr delivered his "I have a dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Such a pivotal moment in the history of this country.
"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."
I was 8 when I heard that speech on TV, carried I think on the nightly news with Walter Cronkite, only hours after Dr King uttered them.
His words hit home with a kid who was just starting to come to terms with the scope of what horrors our species is capable of. I had only recently noticed on the arms of a couple of our neighbors, Sol and Selina, the serial numbers tattooed there. I don't remember which concentration camp they'd survived, but they had survived, unlike most of their family. They couldn't have been more than teenagers when they went to the camps.
Seeing images, as I grew, of lynchings, of police with water cannons aimed at unarmed black protesters, of police dogs snarling at innocents, I could not shake the comparison from my mind of what had befallen 6 million of Europe's Jews, including most of my maternal grandmother's family.
Dr King spoke to me that evening, as he spoke to all in this country. I at least was in a place that I heard him, and his words still echo in my soul 50 years later.
"And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when 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!"
Such a pivotal moment in the history of this country.
"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."
I was 8 when I heard that speech on TV, carried I think on the nightly news with Walter Cronkite, only hours after Dr King uttered them.
His words hit home with a kid who was just starting to come to terms with the scope of what horrors our species is capable of. I had only recently noticed on the arms of a couple of our neighbors, Sol and Selina, the serial numbers tattooed there. I don't remember which concentration camp they'd survived, but they had survived, unlike most of their family. They couldn't have been more than teenagers when they went to the camps.
Seeing images, as I grew, of lynchings, of police with water cannons aimed at unarmed black protesters, of police dogs snarling at innocents, I could not shake the comparison from my mind of what had befallen 6 million of Europe's Jews, including most of my maternal grandmother's family.
Dr King spoke to me that evening, as he spoke to all in this country. I at least was in a place that I heard him, and his words still echo in my soul 50 years later.
"And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when 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!"
