Prejudice persists after MLK
by Father John J. Geaney, CSP
January 20, 2014

Today we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. with a holiday. He was the major leader of the civil rights movement of the ’60s and deeply admired and honored by people all around the world. His belief in civil rights began with his belief in the non-violent principles of the great Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi believed that the way to peace was the walk through justice and justice was best achieved in a non-violent way. Martin Luther King believed nonviolence was the only way to deal with the injustice all around him. He was a black man who lived in the South. He saw and drank from fountains that were marked “blacks only”; he knew that his children would not get the education that they were capable of if the culture did not change. So, he went about changing it.

We can sometimes forget what African Americans dealt with on a day to day basis in the American society. Novels like, “The Help,” can help us to understand; movies like, “12 Years a Slave,” can make us wonder – was it ever really like this, and yet we know deep inside that it was. We can also say “that’s the past. It doesn’t work that way today.” And the divisions between black and white and other races have been healed somewhat, but there is much that still needs to be done before we arrive at the day when all of us are considered equal to one another.

I have many black friends and they often say that they feel prejudice every day. When I’ve pressed them on ‘every’ day; they insisted that yes, every day they ‘felt’ discrimination. Having been a pastor of a black parish, I’ve also felt that discrimination. Can I say exactly what the feeling is? No, I

cannot. But I do know that the prejudice is real. One teenager at the parish told me that there was prejudice in the high school she attended. When I asked what she meant, she told me of cruel negative reactions from many of the white students to the inauguration of President Obama. I cannot repeat here what was said about it. But I was stunned that such prejudice was alive enough that students felt they could speak as they did publicly.

So, what do we do about the prejudice we find in our daily lives against people of color when we are white? How do people of color bury their prejudices about the majority white Americans?

Dr. King put it this way in his last speech as the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference: “Let us realize that William Jennings Bryan is right: ‘Truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right. ‘Be not deceived. God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.’ This is for hope for the future and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow with cosmic past tense, ‘We have overcome, we have overcome; deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.’”