MLK

Many moons ago when I was a fairly new attorney I represented an African-American principal. I honestly do not recall the reason. If memory serves me correctly it was a dispute about work performance, something really petty. What I do recall was reviewing the principal's personnel record. He was a long-term employee. He had more than three decades of service in the school system. Or should I write "systems."

I was shocked when I reviewed his file. When hired he worked for the "negro" schools. The first four or five years of this man's career were spent in a state-sanctioned segregated school system. It floored me. I grew up in Ohio, not exactly a land of racial harmony, but throughout my primary and secondary education the schools I attended were twenty to thirty percent African-American or more. There was de facto segregation by neighborhood, but I grew up in the north - there were no colored- or white-only drinking fountains, bathrooms, waiting rooms, or such. The "South" was an alien world to me. That was the bad place where white people were mean and cruel to black folks. Not we Ohioans. Jim Crow was not a Buckeye ...

By the time I met that principal I'd lived in Virginia. I'd traveled in Kentucky. But as for "the South," well, I'd never really been there. Miami is not exactly the heart of Dixie.

That file made an impression on me. I'd not confronted such overt racial distinctions before, certainly not in that context. There in black and white, pun intended, was the man's application to work in the black system - the white schools would never have hired him. Before that day, I'd certainly never sat down and asked an African-American person who was raised in the South before desegregation just what his life was like. It was surreal. That world of civil rights demonstrations, protests, lawsuits, the joke that was "separate but equal" - that was not the distant past left to the sands of time. I learned instead that it was this man's life.

I'm a bit older now. I've seen more of my nation. I've lost that smugness of being a Northerner. My home city has had race riots that have gutted its core - again. My beloved Chicago is an example of how we Midwesterners can craft a segregated society as miserable and bigoted as anything the South ever created, without need for a single law or a single "whites only" beach. And I've come to appreciate what an incredible leap we have made as a nation within living memory, as well as how far we have to go.

I attribute a significant amount of the distance we've covered on the journey from a past of slavery and its repercussions to a more just society to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He led through moral suasion, through appeals to peace and reason, he led through example. He appealed to the best in us, not the base.

When people realize the power that they have within themselves to effect change for the better, to improve their lot in this life, to become agents of change and to no longer suffer as others' subjects, the world is a better place for it. True leadership does not dictate - it educates and unleashes and channels that latent energy.

In that vein, I believe wholeheartedly in the labor movement. To me, at its best, it is the most effective engine of social change. Beyond better wages, safer work sites, shorter hours - more time for living and less spent working - the labor movement has fought for the franchise, for education, and, frankly, for freedom. Dr. King saw, appreciated, understood, and articulated the overlap between the civil rights movement and the labor movement. Indeed, they are two sides of the same coin, existing symbiotically - or not at all, as any survivor of fascism or totalitarianism can tell you.

The man was murdered while he was in Memphis supporting a garbage workers' strike. The lowest of the low organized and demanded to be treated like human beings, with dignity. They carried signs that read simply, "I am a man." Not a cog, not a machine, but a human being. Dr. King came to support them, and in that way he came to his end. I have come to appreciate Dr. King for his work on behalf of workers, for making that connection between workers' rights and civil rights, and for indeed nudging us along to a world where we are not to be judged by the color of our skin but the content of our character.

I was not alive myself when Dr. King preached the gospel and spread the good news about a fairer, freer world that we could bring into being if we just worked at it. His life came to a premature and cruel end before I was born. For me today is a day to think about what he stood for, to reflect where we've been and we're we need to go as citizens of this nation, and to mourn. There is not a doubt in my mind the world would have been a better place had we had Dr. King to accompany us on the long journey to justice for at least a few more steps.