On this day that every American should not merely honor but quietly, sincerely thank Dr. King, it also is a moment to reflect on what could have been.
In my life.
Not until my late years did one of the powerful regrets of my life bubble, uncomfortably, guiltily, to the surface.
In the early and middle 1960s, when the civil rights movement was galloping wildly across the Deep South, pulsating toward a life-changing climax in many suddenly awakened black and white young Americans, I slept.
While Dr. King and his brave black and white followers were daily endangering their own lives and their families’ safety, I was snugly, distantly tucked away in the North. Foolishly, I believed that passive emotional support fulfilled my obligation as a privileged, supposedly fair-minded young citizen.
It Was the Wrong Call
Only in these later years, not in the crucial, threatening moments of crisis and decision, did I realize what a gaffe I had committed.
I was raised in a family with a laid-back World War II mentality, parents who believed that if you placed a sign or a light in the window demonstrating your patriotism, you had fulfilled your obligation as a loyal citizen.
No Paul Reveres here. Riding through the sparsely settled countryside, warning Colonial Americans sounded appealing – in an arm’s lengthy manner. So very romantic. Seemed appealing mainly because it was so remote, so un-today. More than 160 years before I was born. What did it matter?
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was no more relevant to me than that vague chap Revere.
My Needs Had Been Met
The solidly integrated neighborhood of my childhood – of the perhaps 25 families in our immediate area, about five were black and indistinctive I thought, from any other residents.
The notion of going south and joining the Freedom Riders, or any random group, was too risky, too Not My Fight to even consider.
The horrendous odds for mere survival, much less success, that snarled, spat and clubbed at Dr. King’s head on a near daily basis either was unknown or willfully ignored by me, owing to my narrow education and even slenderer sense of morality.
I read the newspapers in a cursory manner.
I read all of the ugly stories, of cops and dogs savagely attacking protestors because they were black or agreed with blacks. Not a string stirred in my soul. Incidents may as well have occurred 40,000 miles away on the moon. Or 190 years earlier in Colonial America.
Shamefully, to a contentedly insulated Northern boy who had what he wanted, the outrageously immoral, illegal racial discrimination that Dr. King courageously challenged by the hour, meant nothing to me. Until it was decades too late.
