It was 40 years ago today

Normally we are all about fun here at YJKOBT but every once in a while there is something a bit more serious that needs to be discussed. It was 40 years ago today April 4, 1968 that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis Tennessee where he was attempting to help solve a sanitation workers strike. As a child I was told about Dr. King by my parents. They were part of the civil rights movement and part of my childhood was spent in a mostly black neighborhood in Greensboro North Carolina where my father was the pastor at a mostly black Lutheran Church. For some small part I lived part of the civil rights movement and learned of the nastiness that people in the south even during the 1970s showed towards those who supported integration and equality for African Americans.

Later when we lived in Salisbury, North Carolina we attended a church that was all white except for my sister who is bi-racial. I have never been the same since the day that my innocence was taken from me when on the phone someone claiming to be with the KKK threatened to blow our house up because in his words my dad was the "one bringing niggers into the church". I cried and asked my mom why they hated my sister so much and she answered that they were people filled with hate and not love and they were cowards to threaten children and work in secret. I was 10 years old and my innocence was lost that day and I still do not understand the hatred and racial tensions that still seem to exist in this country. We are all just people, human beings, what deep down does skin color really matter anyway? Sometimes I wonder if another "King" Rodney King wasn't onto something when he asked, "Why can't we all just get along?"

On this day let's take pause for a minute and reflect on the closing words from Dr. Kings most famous speech, The I have a Dream Speech given August 28, 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. I think the are still applicable today:

'when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" '

My wish for today is for each of us to do our own small part of letting freedom, TRUE freedom ring.

-Doc