Martin Luther King essay in America Magazine
I just published an essay in America Magazine about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death:
Martin Luther King Jr. was not supposed to be in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Dr. King’s staffers wanted him to decline an invitation to address the city’s striking sanitation workers so he could focus on the upcoming march on Washington for economic justice. He went anyway.
Two months earlier, on the afternoon of Feb. 1, 1968, Echol Cole and Robert Walker sat in the back of an orange garbage truck to escape the rain. They were Memphis “tub-toters,” the overworked and underpaid men who rode on the back of garbage trucks, hopping on and off at every suburban house to empty trash cans into their trucks’ compactors. The city did not provide them with raincoats—or much else. “No benefits, no pension, no overtime, no grievance procedure, no uniforms,” in the words of the Memphis historian Hampton Sides.
Re-reading King’s speech, I cannot help but think of the current crises in the United States. A quarter of our neighbors’ children live in poverty. A fifth of our neighbors suffer from persistent loneliness. Millions of our neighbors live in the shadows as second-class citizens because of their immigration or criminal status. Hundreds of millions of our global neighbors are threatened by a changing climate that our own nation helped destabilize. And with median white wealth dwarfing median black wealth 12 to 1, many of our black neighbors are still left wondering when the American Dream will include them.
Our nation has fallen among thieves.
As a result, it seems as if everybody in the late 2010s likes to talk about how they do not want to live in the late 2010s. Some of us want it to be the past again. Some of us want it to be the future already. We either pine for the whitewashed America that came before, say, the millennials or the internet messed everything up, or we pine for the progressive America that will come after, say, demographic and technological trends finally solve all of our public problems. If only, if only it were the 1950s or the 2050s, then everything would be better, we think.
Read the whole essay — Martin Luther King Jr. and today’s road to Jericho — here.
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/04/02/martin-luther-king-jr-and-todays-road-jericho