Honoring the Honorable

Honoring the Honorable
2/3/2021 2:07:00 PM by: Susan Lyttek

For a while, I decided I would honor Black History Month this year with my blog posts. But as a person who is decidedly lacking in melanin, I do feel like people might think I’m being presumptuous or even worse, phony. So before I start honoring the heroes I admire that fit in with the theme of the month, I thought I should introduce it a bit.

For the last couple of months, a couple of the students I tutor have been doing lessons about the Civil Rights Movement. Helping them with these have reinforced not only things I learned in school, but my own experiences in the 70s, not so long after the Civil Rights legislation was passed, and my stint working in a Civil Rights office as an adult.

So much has changed, yet so much has stayed the same.

I think about my friend Aaron. His family moved into our neighborhood in 1973. He quickly became part of our group. We were a bunch of fifth and sixth graders that hung around together, road bikes, played basketball and the like.

Then one day he told us that he had to move. Had to. It wasn’t that his family wanted to. But they were being forced out because of the color of their skin. I was shocked and horrified that I was losing a good friend for something like that. They’d been in the neighborhood less than 2 years.

Later, as a teen, I thought things had changed a lot more. When I was 17, working a part-time job, I became friends with the janitor who was only a year older. Friends. Nothing romantic or anything like that. But when my boss saw me going to lunch with him, he took steps to firing me. Why? Because I, a white girl, was socializing with a black young man. I saw us as two human beings with things to talk about. My boss saw a cultural divide that he would not allow. In the fifteen years since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, things still hadn’t changed enough.

Last weekend, I watched the TED talk called the Golden Circle. It’s been around awhile, so you might have seen it. Basically, if I were to sum up a 30-minute talk in a few words, it’s about getting to the ‘why’ of doing things. This includes the ‘why’ of living, marketing, or addressing change. In short, if you know your purpose and explain your passion for it, people will get on board.

The crowning example of the guy’s talk was Dr. King. In a day before internet, he got so many people thrilled with his idea of change, that a quarter of a million people showed up to stand with him in Washington, D.C. in 1963. Then they stayed and stood to listen to him in spite of the summer heat. They did this because they bought into his why. They could see the passion on his face and thrilled to the idea. There was a dream that they could get behind.

His birthday may have been last month, but I am honoring him this week. If you look at the title, I think that honor is the key fact about the man. It’s been nearly sixty years since the “I Have a Dream” speech and its essence remains as true as when he spoke it. Even more possibly. But now I think the history books have remained kind to Dr. King because of one key fact.

He was honorable.

He lived according to the code of the Bible as close as a human can. He was not divine, but he lived out the call of the divine. His message, his call to apply love to the unlovely and solve hate with love, are just as needed now as they were when he lived.

Maybe more so.

While in some aspects our nation has made advances since the 1960s, too many people forget one thing: we’re all people. And until Jesus comes again or revival happens so that people recognize that any human being, no matter what they look like or where they come from, is a person and a neighbor on this world of ours, we will still need to revisit Dr. King’s speech, his ideals and pray for a more unified tomorrow.

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