WASHINGTON — Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?
The title of Martin Luther King Jr.’s last book, published in 1967 after Selma and after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, poses a perennially appropriate question — about our country’s struggle over race, of course, but also about our larger quest for justice.
It is much better than the question President Obama rightly scorned on Saturday as he honored the 50th anniversary of Selma’s Bloody Sunday in one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency. To ask if our current struggles, in Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere, suggest that “with respect to race, little has changed in this country” would sound absurd to those who lived through the oppression of the past.
Neither the demonstrators nor the police who pummeled them as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 could have imagined that in 2015, an African-American president would be leading the ceremonies memorializing the moment. They would have been just as astonished that the states of the Old Confederacy now send one African-American to the Senate and 19 to the House, including John Lewis, whose beating on the bridge marked the beginning of his career as a national treasure.
But politics rarely produces final victories, and even the victories that do endure are often partial. Thus did Obama insist that a true love of country entails a belief “that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation.”