Giants in the Earth

I recall listening to someone who had lived in Guatemala when ordinary people were being shot and tossed into wells for protesting their poverty and for resisting power: our power. In later years, I talked to some of the widows and survivors, in Guatemala. The speaker said that it had been a thicket of complex problems, but that finally he had decided to stand with those who had to work all day for a loaf of bread.

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthdate. We know that because there is no mail delivery, and a street bears his name. If that were all--and sometimes it seems to--it would be a pathetic legacy.

That is not all.

Forty-four years ago, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot to death, I was one of those sad but necessary people in California trying to make it possible for the black people who worked in our town to be able to buy houses in our town. Our town was a white town.

At the time, wha we were doing was pretty messy. The law said realtors couldn't discriminate against minorities, but they did. People wanted them to. The realtors were just people. All we did was to entrap them in their lies, and their actions. It was not heroic work, even when our neighbors threatened us, nor when the FBI asked our neighbors to watch us, and report. There wasn't anything to watch, and to report. We were just people, too.

As is always the case in great movements, there were a few giants, and lots of ordinary people. We were ordinary. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a giant. We didn't see what he saw, nor say what he said. We saw some things, and did a little, and said something.

When I moved to the south side of Chicago, a year later, I began to understand. I never understood why any black person wanted to live in our town, except for something bigger than us or our town, or themselves.

Few are giants. For most of us, it is privilege to have seen people like Martin Luther King, Jr. march by in history, and to have tried to understand. It is grace to have been able to vote for a black president.

There is much more to be done. We have never had a woman president; not here. Nor an asian president, nor even a Congress that was representative of our genders and races and diversity.

Few of us are born to greatness, or can choose it. Few of us are thrust into it. All of us can choose where we stand.

Comments

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