Fifty Years After I Have a Dream
America has a sordid history in race relations. Anyone who denies it doesn’t read the history books. Slavery was real. For those of us who live in the north…like northeast Ohio…slavery was just thirty miles down Route 11 across the river. We may be distanced by time, but not space. Even during the Civil War, slavery continued in upstart border state West Virginia until the war was over. It was not isolated to the deep south. Moving forward, one bumps into reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, institutionalized segregation, poll taxes and literacy tests…and scarier, the KKK and lynching. Up in the smug north, de-facto segregation took root with red lining, segregated neighborhoods leading to segregated schools, and job discrimination. It wasn’t pretty. This week marks the 50 th anniversary of the famous and infamous March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. There were many people b...