The dream is still a dream

Right at this time of year, in the fall of 1976, I got on a school bus to head across Des Moines to my first day of kindergarten.  Since I had been open-enrolled I didn’t know anyone in that room the first day.  My neighbors all went to the school close to my house.  In that classroom I found that some of my classmates had pink skin like mine.  Others had dark skin and cool hair (this was the day of big afros).  As a kindergartner none of that mattered.  I just wanted to find friends to play with!

At the time I didn’t realize what it meant for a school to be 'integrated.'  My new school resided in a predominantly African-American part of town and housed kindergarten through 3^rd grade.  Across Des Moines sat Perkins Elementary in a mainly white neighborhood with 4^th through 6^th grade.  Busses took kids from one neighborhood to the other, ensuring that black and white kids sat next to each other in the classroom.  The full name of the school: Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School. 

A scant 13 years before Martin Luther King Jr. had proclaimed his dream, “I have a dream

that one day in Alabama … little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”  Dr. King proclaimed that dream in the midst of a divided nation, with African Americans not welcome in many parts of the country.  To many it seemed like only a dream.  I didn’t live in Alabama, but by 1976 that integration had started to come to Iowa!

Barely eight years before I walked into that kindergarten classroom James Earl Ray had assassinated Dr. King.  Racial tensions still embroiled much of the country.  People felt scared…hurt…disillusioned. 

In 1976 I knew nothing of all these recent events.  I was just a kid in kindergarten, and little kids are open to playing with anyone who comes along.  I grew up in a world that, at least publically, celebrated racial tolerance. 

I have lived my life in a post-Civil Rights era.  A part of me wants to say, “Race is no longer an issue in this country.  Can’t we just get over it?”  But then Trayvon Martin is killed by George Zimmerman and the racial divide explodes once again, reminding us that we do not yet live in Dr. King’s (or God’s) dream world.   I can’t just pretend that generations of blatant racism has come to an end.  This week the nation remembered the march on Washington that occurred fifty years ago.  While that’s before my time, many people still living remember it well.  The turbulent events of the Civil Rights movement still shape people's experience of the world.  In historical terms our country is still pretty new with the racial equality conversation. 

We have a long way to go.  We live in a world where African-Americans are more likely to be stopped by police, more likely to be ‘watched closely’ while shopping, more likely to be imprisoned for a crime (even compared to other ethnicities committing the same offense).  We live in a world where people hold their purses closer when an African-American walks by or where people lock their car doors when driving through an African-American part of town. 

It’s time for a change!  It’s time to recognize that the color of our skin doesn’t reflect our character…it reflects the God that works as a brilliant artist, creating a wide variety of hues to cover people’s bodies.  It’s time to treat each other as fellow members of God’s creation, not as a sub-group that is somehow different than ‘us.’   Those who live in 'ethnic enclaves (and many small Minnesota towns qualify, including Eyota which is 98.9% white) have the obligation to find ways for our children to interact with people of other races, else they grow up with an 'us vs. them' mentality.   It's a lot easier to tell jokes about 'those people' if you don't know them personally!  God calls us to rise above all that.  We are one in God's family.  People are people, no matter how much pigment they have in their skin!

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom 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!