Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We’ve officially celebrated Dr. King’s birthday (Jan. 15, 1929) every third Monday of January as a federal holiday since 1986, though it took until 2000 for the last of our 50 states to mark its own official observance.
But if we’ve ever needed to pay attention to Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolent protest, if we’ve ever needed to assess not only how far we’ve come in race relations since the Atlanta native’s assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968, but also how far we need to travel, it would seem to be this year of all years.
Look around. This past summer was framed by the Black Lives Matter movement because too few black lives – notably Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rashard Brooks and Jacob Blake – seemed to matter to law enforcement officers who killed all but Blake, leaving him possibly paralyzed for life.
Painting “Black Lives Matter” on NBA courts, as the league did during its “bubble-ized” completion of the 2019-20 season, is one thing. Making everyone understand the need to embrace such a mindset is another – though, at the risk of angering some, to say “All Lives Matter,” if taken at face value rather than being politicized, also has much merit.
AP photo by Charles Kelly / Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. speaks in Alabama in February 1968.But as this city’s Orlando Lightfoot, the senior manager of Boys & Girls Clubs of Chattanooga and one of the best basketball players this city has ever produced, noted a little more than a week ago while referencing a line first uttered by NBA superstar LeBron James a few days earlier: “There are two different Americas, and while we’ve (Black America) come a long way in 200 years, there’s still a long way to go.”