So much more than a Birthday…

I was almost 5 years old… too young to understand the vagaries of social interaction. Events were happening in my nation that as a little girl I would miss. My focus was on hopscotch and barbie dolls and good books read by my devoted mother. But the events happening in those days would change the nation I call home and shape how I see my neighbors. I lived in Virginia at the time, just on the northern edge of the south. But since my family moved in military circles, we were somewhat shielded from the racism that defined southern relationships. On base, we were just Navy families, all of us trying to navigate the deployments and transfers that challenged even the best of family ties. Race did not define, rank did. My father made sure that race did not interfere with the progression of rank. At Chapel, we were all just kids, singing in choir, and learning Bible stories. Again, race differences had no place in that setting.

But the world around us was on fire, especially in the south. On March 7, 1965, while I was probably playing an innocent game of hide-and-seek with friends, brave people marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They were on their way from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest for the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The stage was set for confrontation. Even the name of the bridgenamed for a Confederate general and KKK leaderpointed to the potential for confrontation. As the people crossed the bridge, they sang hymns. Then State troopers moved in with billy clubs, tear gas, and cattle prods. US Representative John Lewis was there that day. Representative Lewis faithfully served the people of Georgia for over three decades. That day, he called for the people to kneel in prayer. Across the bridge the marchers kneeled, bowed, without effort to resist the troopers. As the news media watched and filmed, marchers were gassed, beaten and dragged off the bridge. The scenes from the bridge that splashed across the evening news broke the heart of a nation and left my mom weeping. Two days later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would lead marchers to the edge of the bridge only to be turned back by State troopers. Two weeks later, under federal protection, Dr. King would lead over 3,000 marchers over that bridge and on to Montgomery to speak for equal voting rights.

Those events just before my 5th birthday would open the eyes of a nation to what hate looks like. Could our national leaders remain indifferent to the call for civil rights in the face of such inhumane brutality? The Voting Rights Act passed in August of that same year. But there was still so much to be done. I remember a teacher I had in 6th grade in a Virginia school, who chastised me for sitting at the black kid’s table at lunch. “You don’t want to be friends with ‘those kind,’ because no one will be friends with you.” She was a racist, but she wasn’t wrong. There were many kids who kept their distance from me because I was friends with ‘their kind.’ I was always so grateful when the Navy saw fit to move us north or west, where racism was not so prominent. But to be honest, even in Pennsylvania, now decades later, racism is a quiet, insidious reality that touches our lives and shapes our perspective.

That is why I have always been thankful for President Ronald Reagon’s bold signing of the 1983 law that declared Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday a federal holiday. That third Monday in January is not a memorial to a man, brilliant though he was. It is not a testament to a bold, faithful, courageous leader, who gave his life for the cause of civil rights. That day is about a movement to work toward an open and free society, where every person is valued, where we live into our national pledge to create a nation “with liberty and justice for all.” That day is about a dream, a God-given dream, that “one day, our children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” (MLK) We need this federal holiday as a standing reminder that there is still so much work to be done to realize that dream. I will leave you with a few Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes to consider: 

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”
“Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.”
“We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
“Faith is taking the first step even when you can't see the whole staircase.”

I was born a child of the 60’s, an era when people not only demanded change, they expected that change was possible. This federal holiday reminds our nation that we have only just begun to realize the dream. May we as God’s people rededicate ourselves to shaping a world where every person is valued as one ‘created in the image of God.’

With you, remembering the call,
Anita