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We all can pray for racial harmony
Originally appeared on spirituality.com
I was an unimportant foot soldier in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. I didn’t participate in the now-famous march at Selma, Alabama, organized by my hero, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. And although I later met Rosa Parks, the symbol of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, I never knew anyone else that the media focused on, so I certainly never had any “reflected glory.” Yet I found my work in adult literacy in the inner cities of St. Louis and Kansas City meaningful, and I believe a lot of people benefited, receiving their high school equivalency and getting better jobs.
We were all sustained in those days by an idealism that, while resilient, now seems a bit naive. I think most of us felt that the problems of racism would be solved by the year 2007, which seemed so far away then. We all believed that Dr. King’s famous dream—in which black children would play in a natural way alongside white children in a brotherhood that would continue until adulthood—would have become a complete reality.
But while progress has been made, that dream has yet to be realized.
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