Much Has, Can And Will Be Accomplished, King Would Agree

1-22-10

When Oneonta Mayor Richard P. Miller, Jr., graduated from a suburban Rochester high school in the early 1960s, there was not a single black in his graduating class.
He went to Middlebury College.  Among the 325 freshmen, there was one black.
In Vietnam, he observed that not a single officer in his company was black.
Miller related those vignettes in addressing the annual commemoration of Martin Luther King Day, sponsored by the NAACP, Oneonta Chapter, and held this year at Oneonta Temple Beth El on Chestnut Street.
We’ve all come a long way, baby, all of us.  For it’s a truism that prejudice harms the holder to as great a degree as the target.  Hatred curdles life’s sweetness.

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Miller went on to observe that integration is complete “at the very top,” a reference President Obama, a black president in our nation’s White House.
That, certainly, should have been a source of pride to all Americans, whatever our politics, on Martin Luther King Day 2010.
The new mayor further observed that, nonetheless, a disproportionate number of blacks are among the ranks of our nation’s impoverished.
Today, while the unemployment rate for all workers has topped 10 percent, it is 16.2 percent for blacks.
This should be a continuing source of shame, but not a source of hopelessness.
As Miller’s story underscores, there has been progress, vast progress in the lifetimes of many of us who are not that old.
Let’s project that progress ahead another lifetime, or half lifetime, and we will see: Much remains to be accomplished before we will indeed love one another.  But much will be.