{"id":1476,"date":"2008-08-27T23:49:22","date_gmt":"2008-08-27T23:49:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/27\/martin-luther-k\/"},"modified":"2015-11-09T13:25:43","modified_gmt":"2015-11-09T20:25:43","slug":"martin-luther-k","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/27\/martin-luther-k\/","title":{"rendered":"MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mlk_wave_from_podium\"<\/a>I was about to be a senior in high school that summer, with my family on vacation in Provincetown, MA<\/a>, at the tip of Cape Cod.\u00a0 \u00a0All I really wanted to do was find Edna St. Vincent Millay’s<\/a> summer hangout and the theater used by Eugene O’Neill\u00a0 <\/a>and the Provincetown Players.<\/a>\u00a0 Those were gone; instead, I tripped over a future that quickly ended my quest for the past.<\/p>\n

Walking by a restaurant, we passed a TV sitting on the sidewalk, on a milk crate so everyone could watch.\u00a0 On the air: the March on Washington<\/a> and the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King.\u00a0 I was transfixed.\u00a0 Living in a little town outside Pittsburgh, I hadn’t really paid much attention.\u00a0 Until that moment.\u00a0 It was August 28, 1963, and it launched the next phase of my life.\u00a0 As I watched, I knew that I belonged there – where there was purpose – in the middle of history.\u00a0 It was a profound thing to listen to this man, to see the sea of people around him, watch the individual interviews, hear the music.\u00a0 When people wonder how we became a generation of activists, I know that this was one of the moments that drove us forward, if we weren’t there already.<\/p>\n

How beautiful then that EXACTLY 45 years later, Barack Obama will accept the nomination of his party to be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.\u00a0 I heard Rep. John Lewis<\/a>, so badly beaten in the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge<\/a>, tell an interviewer that he wasn’t sure he could make it through his own<\/em> speech — that if anyone had told him that 45 years after that Selma march he’d watch an African-American man accept the presidential nomination, he would have told them they were crazy.\u00a0 Obama adviser and friend Valerie Jarrett, describing what it would mean to her parents in an interview <\/a>with our own Erin Kotckei Vest,<\/a> struggled to contain her own tears.\u00a0 This is important.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And not just to African Americans.\u00a0 Many people my age spent years
\nworking for civil rights while at home, in college, and out in the
\nworld.\u00a0 \u00a0Three civil rights workers our age, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney,<\/a>
\ntwo white and one black, were murdered by racists in Mississippi.
\nDozens our age, white and black, were beaten, arrested and terrorized
\non Freedom Rides.<\/p>\n

Now the Democratic Party will be headed by an African-American man
\nwho was a tiny child when John Lewis faced police beatings on that
\nbridge.<\/p>\n

\"Biden_obamas\"<\/a>
\nNow a black presidential nominee and a white VP nominee can hug –\u00a0and hug one another’s wives, on a public platform and evoke no\u00a0comment.\u00a0 And there will be<\/em> no comment because it’s no big\u00a0deal.\u00a0 It brought me to tears though – because I can remember when it\u00a0would have been a VERY big deal indeed.<\/p>\n

Our country has changed, and grown, since that day I stood,
\nthrilled, in Provincetown.\u00a0 Younger Americans have grown up in or in neighborhoods that include biracial\u00a0households, are more and
\nmore “post-racial” and expect the same attitudes in their leaders.<\/p>\n

Think about it.\u00a0 We’ve been in such a feverish day-to-day battle
\nthat we’ve forgotten what an amazing thing this is.\u00a0 I’m accused of
\nbeing romantic, idealistic, optimistic – all those “ics” but it’s
\npretty tough to argue with this: this is a very special moment in our
\nhistory. (And yes, I know we still have so so much to do – I’m hopeful, not a moron.) But if America is as ready as the Democratic party, we are on a
\npath toward a different country and, as census reports demonstrate<\/a>, not a moment too soon.<\/p>\n

Remember that line of Dr. King’s:\u00a0 “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.” <\/em> Could it be that parts of that dream may actually now have the potential to come true?\u00a0 If we can get this far, perhaps we’re ready to go the rest of the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was about to be a senior in high school that summer, with my family on vacation in Provincetown, MA, at the tip of Cape Cod.\u00a0 \u00a0All I really wanted to do was find Edna St. Vincent Millay’s summer hangout and the theater used by Eugene O’Neill\u00a0 and the Provincetown Players.\u00a0 Those were gone; instead, … Continue reading MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,4,27,7,9,97],"tags":[815,1291,469,1287,1290,383,285,1288,1285,92,21,1196,1026,1289,1286],"class_list":["post-1476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aging","category-baby-boom","category-current-affairs","category-life","category-politics","category-television","tag-biden","tag-chaney","tag-civil-rights","tag-edund-pettus-bridge","tag-goodman","tag-march-on-washington","tag-martin-luther-king","tag-mississippi","tag-mlk","tag-obama","tag-politics-2","tag-race","tag-racism","tag-schwerner","tag-selma-march"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-nO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1476"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3575,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions\/3575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}