The Cup O' Joe Report 01/16/06: Dr. King's Legacy

This is a transcript of Joe Vecchio's daily "Cup O' Joe Report" podcast, availaible here and posted with the permission of the author.

More than forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King told the world of his dream of racial equality. He stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and said, in bold and powerful language, that people of color were sick of being second class citizens and that they wouldn't rest until they were truly free. So how far have we come since then?

Look, let's face a simple reality here: no legislation, no matter how well written, is going to wipe away hundreds of years of bigotry. It was almost a century after Jefferson wrote that all men were created equal that Lincoln legally freed the slaves, but a hundred years after that, things were still so bad that there were riots in the street. And anyone who thinks it's ended is wrong. Sure, the racists have to be more deceptive about spreading their hate, but the hate is still there. I'm not saying things are as bad as they were in 1963, but face it we still have a long way to go.

And here's the deal: Dr. King's speech was specifically about racial inequality in the United States, if you read between the lines you'll see he was speaking of something greater. Because his dream wasn't just about freeing one group of people in one country, it was about freeing all of us from the darker side of our nature. When we truly start to judge a person by the nature of their character, when we stop exploiting people for profit, when we stop killing each other over land or money or oil or religion, then we can finally say that we are free, at last.

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