Martin Luther King Day is set aside each year to celebrate the great impact of the civil rights leader, cut short by an assassin’s bullet at age 39.
Slavery, in which human beings are just another commodity, was legally outlawed long before King was born, but African Americans and other minorities continued to suffer — still do — a multitude of injustices in their daily lives. His mission was to remove those many barriers.
I recall from “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” the appalling harshness of slavery. You may remember President Lincoln, in an audience with its author, Harriet Beecher Stowe, remarked: “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”
“This big war” occurred because Southern states were dead set on keeping slavery intact. Lincoln had the courage to respond and declare emancipation the law of the land, truly a highlight of our nation’s history.
The book — fiction but based on a real character — follows Uncle Tom, a slave in Kentucky sold down the Mississippi River. Many other elements are wound into the intriguing narrative, and one struck me soundly, a soliloquy by a slave owner who, unlike most, had a kind heart:
“Tell me any man living wants to work all his days, from day-dawn to dark, under the constant eye of a master, without power of putting forth one irresponsible volition, on the same dreary, monotonous, unchanging toil, and all for two pairs of pantaloons and a pair of shoes a year, with enough food and water to keep him in working order for a year!”
Slavery may be rationalized as being of another time, “when things were different,” but no matter how you cut it, slavery was a cataclysmic fault of immense proportions, the result of greedy and uncaring men and women who bought and sold other human beings, and tossed them on the scrapheap when their value was gone.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ’60s wasn’t solely the province of King. Still, his role was exceedingly important, from the “I Have a Dream” speech to innumerable and compelling efforts to change how African Americans and other minorities were treated, legally and socially.
That King emboldened so many to follow in his footsteps is among his greatest accomplishments.
The day of King’s birth in 1929 being set aside as a federal holiday was signed into law by President Reagan in 1983 and first observed in 1986.
Come Monday, please take time to be thankful for advances made in tolerance and inclusiveness, but don’t be satisfied with one day, consider ways we can do even better — for everyone, regardless of race, religious persuasion or gender preference.
