By Mike Van Meter
Several years ago my son, then 10, found himself baffled by the segment of Ken Burns' "Baseball" that told the story of the Negro Leagues.
"They wouldn't let them play in the Major Leagues just because they were black?" Matthew wondered aloud.
Matthew is growing up in a world where skin color doesn't matter, yet has discovered that folks still alive remember when flesh tone was cause for discrimination, torture or death.
How long ago? How far away?
In 1974, students at my school elected a black woman as homecoming queen, something worth noting because Roseburg, Oregon, was at that time nearly all white and once was a stronghold of the Ku Klux Klan.
A decade later, near the time my son was born, Roseburg students welcomed the football team of largely black Jefferson High School by lynching an effigy of a black player in the end zone.
How long ago? How far away?
Not one of my journalism students was born when I left Roseburg for college and life. What they know about the civil rights movement is shaped by pieces the same black-and-white news footage I saw live as a young child. That footage is further dimmed by the editing of national memory that would turn the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday into a remembrance merely of a man who "had a dream" or a black heritage week where monotone cities trot out luminaries of color like participants in a pony show.
Writing in the Boston Globe the morning of the holiday, Columbia University Ph.D. candidate John McMillian criticized politicians who are "generally endorsing a simplified, static portrait of King, as if all the man ever did was sleep."
How long ago? How far away?
Few of us care to remember that Dr. King was a hell-raiser: He shined the glaring light of truth on a dark, evil element of a hellish society -- a South that could say "I love Jesus" in one breath and "I hate niggers" without pause. Dr. King made it possible for Roseburg High School to elect a black homecoming queen, for Atlanta to be very proud of its black mayor and not so proud of long-ago traditions borne of slavery.
Yet even as we hail the civil rights movement, we choose to be unaware that hell-raisers in Mexico -- a nation that physically borders our own -- face death for daring to print in their newspapers the truth about drug-traffickers and corrupt businessmen. In California, a state that borders our own, it remains possible to win an election based on political hate speech. In our own town, it is possible for a man to be assaulted because he is gay -- and then, when justice becomes real and the perpetrator is convicted and sentenced, we can stand by silently as a harsh editorials question laws that punish criminals for intent.
How long ago? How far away? Who is my neighbor anyway?
Editor's note: Van Meter is advisor for The Broadside, student newspaper of Central Oregon Community College, and Editorial Consultant to The Source. Portions of this essay were originally delivered in a class lecture on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.