I’ve been to driving school. I admit it. In the first year of work after college, Iowa patrolmen caught me speeding 3 times. While I was in driving school, we reviewed a method for scanning the road ahead of us, which would keep us alert for impending danger. One of the things we had to scan was our rear view mirror. Seems weird to have to look BACKWARDS to navigate FORWARD, but so it is in life.
Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, a holiday for my team, during which I challenged each of us to do something - in our own way - to reflect on Dr. King’s legacy. I just re-read Dr. King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” It’s now 43 years since Dr. King penned that response, and I wonder if he would be proud of how far Birmingham - and all of us - have come.
I had the privilege of speaking in Birmingham a month ago, a period on the end of a couple months of research in their region. The race issues are still alive in the memory of that city, but as an outsider, I’m impressed that those memories have transformed into lessons learned. I met multi-racial families, hung out with Catalyst4Birmingham whose diversity is palpable, struck up a friendship with a powerful lesbian attorney, and of course did an interview with Birmingham View publisher Vickii Howell who intones, “I can’t march, but I’m doing what I can!”
At the ground level, Birmingham is getting it right. Why should Birmingham matter to the rest of us? Because as Dr. King wrote in his letter, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
Rock on Birmingham. Let’s scan that rear view mirror from time to time.
P.S. Dr. King also said in his letter that he didn’t take time to respond to all of his detractors. Good for him… or he would never have gotten anything generative accomplished. Next time your detractors take potshots at you, think of Dr. King. There’s a lot of work to be done, people, and we have to discern how to BEST invest it. Happy M.L.K. Day.
