A Modern Day Pieta
Earlier this week, SPUMC member April Doss posted a moving piece about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and racial realities in 2016 on her blog. She begins like this:
“The death toll this year has been a heart-wrenching one: Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice. A longer list of names goes on, but these are some of the most familiar ones: household names, you might say, for most of us, and tragic reminders of lost love in the households these men – this boy – once called home.
It’s been 53 years since Martin Luther King, Kr. declared a bold dream, and half a century later, we have trouble talking about it across racial and ethnic communities. We have trouble unifying around a message of hope and we disagree about root causes and their significance. Dr. King wrote about this half a century ago as he sat in a Birmingham, Alabama jail: the protests of the civil rights movement were necessary, he said, to provoke the tension that would force an open dialogue between whites and blacks about what our nation’s future would be. For, he said, ‘Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.’”
To read more, visit her blog at: http://www.wecallthesestreetsourhome.org/