(HOST) February is Black History Month, and a card he received on Martin Luther King’s birthday brought back some memories for commentator Tom Slayton, veteran journalist and editor-emeritus of Vermont Life magazine.
(SLAYTON) I got a Martin Luther King Day card from some friends this year. It was the first such card I have ever received, and I liked it.
The card bears a photograph of Dr. King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, with their baby girl, who is wearing a lacy bonnet and a puffy little dress and tiny white shoes. Coretta King is wearing a lacy corsage on her flowered, ruffled dress, and pearls, and one of those perky hats that young, stylish women wore on top of their heads back in the 1950s. She is smiling and looks at her baby with such obvious love in her eyes that it takes my breath away.
There are other black people standing nearby, and in the background is a big columned building – probably an Alabama state building representing the white government that back then was determined to keep black Americans like Dr. King and his young family in their place – that is, repressed and subservient.
I spent several years of my youth in the South, and I remember buses that had signs instructing "colored patrons" to sit in the rear, and drinking fountains labeled "white" and "colored," with the "colored" fountain a little lower on the wall and a little harder to get to if you wanted a drink. It was a shame and a travesty, and Dr. King was one of those people who were brave enough to rise up and oppose it. He was an undeniably great man.
As I look at this photograph of the beautiful young couple, I can’t help thinking of the long, hard road they’ve got ahead of them. Dr. King would be dead, murdered at the end of that road.
But the point is that, with tenacity and courage and stunning eloquence, Dr. King led black Americans into an era of at least nominal equality, and America became a better, stronger place because of what he and thousands of others like him did.
We might think that we, living in Vermont, are a long way from Alabama, and that therefore the Civil Rights struggle that Dr. King fought and gave his life for is something apart from our experience; but that is not so. I know, because when I was a young newspaper reporter, I was assigned to cover a shooting incident up in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom that became known as "The Irasburg Affair." One thing that tangled case showed, unequivocally, was that pretty, rural Vermont could, in fact, harbor some decidedly unpretty racist sentiments.
We are not separate from the worldwide struggle for human rights and human dignity, even in Vermont, even today.
Dr King said as much. It was quoted on the inside of that card that I received:
"It really boils down to this," said Dr. Martin Luther King, "that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all."
And that sounds like truth to me, the kind of truth that sets people free.
You can find more commentaries from Tom Slayton at VPR-dot-net.