On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Let’s Resolve To Renew Our Common Humanity

When I was growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs in the 1980s, one of my elderly neighbors, Miss Dot, an African American woman who grew up (and spent part of her adult years) in the segregated South, used to tell the neighborhood kids how good we had it.

We used to listen to Miss Dot’s words with respect, but weren’t feeling them, especially since my friends and I were living in the moment. And at that moment, things seemingly sucked: apartheid in South Africa, the AIDS and crack epidemics in America, and several years later, the L.A. riots following the acquittal of four white police officers who nearly beat a black motorist to death.

Today, I’m finally feeling Miss Dot’s words. In the past 30 years, I have seen things I never thought I’d see in my lifetime and have come to embrace views I never thought I would. In the 1990s, we used to joke about dying before we’d see a Black president. I used to be a homophobe. Now, we are in the final days of America’s first Black president, whose eight years in office have transformed the country, and in my personal life, I’ve become a passionate advocate for LGBTQIA equality.

When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. became the most prominent face in the civil rights movement, he knew the change he was pushing for might not occur in his lifetime. It didn’t deter him from pushing for that progress he believed would make America inch closer towards the dream of becoming a more perfect union.


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