People forget that Dr. King’s real life was filled with threats, violence & injuries, not speeches and “dreams.”
Dr. King would’ve been 88 this past Friday.
“ When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of #racism , materialism, & militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
#MLK @blackvoices @democracy #USA @news #AI #ICE #Minnesota #immigration #Minneapolis #Imperialism #socialmedia #mastodon #war #US #love
he would have been 97 or so if he were alive today, it really brings home how recent it was.
the civil rights movement happened within my parents’ lifetimes, but it’s so often spoken about as though it were ages ago & completely out of living memory (to both minimise it & pretend that society’s totally different now 💔)
This really hit home to me when I was a teenager and a colleague at work started talking about the famous demonstrations she attended. She was probably 60, but looked and acted 40, which made it especially jarring.
A similar thing happened when I visited the Martin Luther King Jr national museum in Atlanta. They have pictures and items scattered throughout, and as we were browsing, an older man was nearby excitedly talking about each of the people in the exhibit on a personal level. As it turned out, he was friends with all of them. It made it feel bizarre, because we walked into a history museum, and left with it feeling too recent to be history.
The final shock for me was when my mom casually mentioned that her elementary School was segregated! My siblings and I were shaken. She acted like it was something we should have already known, and maybe we should have already pieced that together when analyzing the time frames. The problem was that the Civil Rights movements in my mind were compartmentalized in the History section.
@Vegan_Joe My MIL occasionally shares stories about being a teen during Jim Crow. When she went to concerts, there were separate sections for the black & white kids to keep them from dancing together.
A side topic, but this pulls to mind the gay rights movement in my lifetime. It always felt like an extension to the civil Rights movement. Which is all the more concerning with the current rhetoric around gender and sexuality.
DOB January 15, 1929 so yes you’re right about how old he would be today (OP said 88)
My grandmother was born in 1922, and there were people who had been slaves and people who had been slaveholders still around for her entire childhood in the US south
@tae_glas @JazzyKindaFella My mom said yesterday at church the priest asked how many people there remembered MLK’s assassination, and many people raised their hands.