How did they miss me?

I'm so white it would be a relief to find some ancestry from outside northern Europe. I'm a walking collection of recessive pigmentation traits. If I sit in the sun unprotected for a few seconds, I can get enough vitamin D for the whole day.

I'm a heterosexual man, fond of pretty women and sports, often at the same time. At age eight, I already knew I wanted to be a scientist (didn't happen, by the way), but a first career as that age's Tom Brady definitely appealed to me even then.

My parents taught me Protestant Christianity. It didn't take in the end, but they gave me what all parents at the time thought they should give.

I grew up in the South, Tennessee to be exact, a Democrat by birth, inheritor to that complicated and often sullied legacy.

In short, by demographics, I was the natural target of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy to move Southern Democrats into the Republican Party, racism, regionalism, and conservativism intact.

How did the Republicans miss me?

In short, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The ugly, callous Southern white men who killed Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman in Philadelphia, Mississippi, who bombed those young girls in Birmingham, who viciously murdered Emmett Till, who clubbed or shot the Selma marchers, who stood in the schoolhouse door - those ugly, callous terrorists were my people, and my parents taught me to be ashamed of them by simply showing me their own shame.

In one way, my mom and dad were radicals. They believed in the power of words and ideas to change the world. They had learned this from their parents, who in their place and time had also been progressive on race, and so they passed it on to me.

King believed this, too, painfully, passionately, sacrificially. That a black man could come up in the American South of the Depression and WWII and Jim Crow and not become a violent revolutionary still fills me with awe and wonder. I could not have done it. But when I hear "I have a dream", I still tear up. Every time.



When King went to Memphis in 1968, he knew he was a target. He knew he might not live out the next day. Yet he was at peace.



He went as he must, as a lamb of God. He went because it still then was an issue whether the black men who carried away the garbage of Memphis were indeed men.

We should all remember that this was only forty years ago. While America has been much changed by his life and by his passing, there is much still to be done.