Tonight at the MLK Service

I'm here in Morehead, KY while the RSI family is in Washington for the inauguration. Tonight's MLK service was the best we've had in the 19 years I've lived in Kentucky. There was a very nice counter-point between the two speakers. Speaking quickly and building to crescendo after crescendo, a black Baptist minister emphasized Barack Obama's roots in the black church. According to Rev. C. B. Akins, Obama didn't learn how to think in terms of "change you can believe in," "yes we can," and "hope" while he was at Harvard and Columbia. He learned that way of thinking in the black church in Chicago.

And Rev. Akins was precisely right.

Rev. Akins also portrayed Obama's victory as part of the struggle for racial uplift in which African-Americans have been engaged from at least the 18th century to today. Akins named Denmark Vecsey along with Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, W. E. B. DuBois, and Ida Wells Barnett as people who made Obama's victory possible and did not hesitate to cite those who were violent or radical.

But Akins started by offering Obama as a model for people who need uplift today.

It was all very well done--and . . . well, uplifting.

Part of what made Rev. Akins so effective is that he followed a local white minister, Rev. Molly Smathers, who spoke movingly about how her and her family dealt with racism in the Lexington, KY area. One topic that gets very little play in the media is the personal connundrums and discouragement that many non-racist whites experience as they deal with racist relatives, co-workers, fellow students, and casual acquaintances. Throughout the election season, I've been struggling over how to deal with my mother's racism toward Obama without sparking a huge counter-productive confrontation. Finally, I told her how much I had hated racism all my life and how happy I was going to be when Obama was elected.

Rev. Smathers talked movingly of her father's response to MLK's assassination, the way her son had punched a kid at his local school for using the n-word toward a black friend of his, and some incidents that occurred during the civil rights movement.

Because Rev. Smathers didn't have a large volume of black friends or historical references, she couldn't speak with the depth of Rev. Akins. But that was fine. It was a significant bit of integration that Rev. Akins and Rev. Smathers could bring together white and black experiences of dealing with racism in this way.

Certainly, I appreciated it. I think Martin Luther King would have liked it too.