Article February 16, 2004 Issue

'EVERYBODY can be GREAT'

By Jeffrey Hildner

I'm a White Guy from the suburbs of Maryland. I can count on one hand the black students who went to my public high school in the middle-income shadows that lie beyond the inner city of Baltimore.

It's some 30 years later, and I live in Manhattan now. I see every color of the rainbow represented about equally in my Columbia University neighborhood on upper Broadway. It feels right. Normal. I'm glad our daughter, a tenth grader, is growing up here. She's colorblind.

But even during the mostly allwhite of my childhood and college years, Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of my heroes. You don't have to be black to feel the "Dream." You don't have to have a special skin color to feel the electricity of truth. You don't have to be a certain age, sex, nationality, or religion to want equality and freedom for one and all. You don't have to live in a city or be downtrodden or disadvantaged to feel that Dr. King was speaking to you and for you—to everyone, for everyone. You just have to be human.