Our Observation

There is no perfect cadence in the march toward freedom. But our united future is undeniably dependent upon its progress.

“We must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said. “We cannot turn back.”

On Aug. 28, 1963, Americans mourned the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination through King’s words.

On that day, and in the days to soon follow, we saw strides forth that would seem to overleap generations in how we treated race in America. Civil rights, seemingly beaten silent through social protocol and the crush of fear for half a century past, found its voice in rising tenor calling out “now is the time.”

On Jan. 17, 2011, standing in the pulpit of Rollins College’s Knowles Chapel, Nadine Smith shared a growing lament of her own time. Herself bearing the triumphs born from persecution as a black woman in America, she, through the toils of courageous forebears, spoke as nearly an equal among the amassed hundreds filling the pews ahead — but not quite.

The irony of her speech, delivered in a place of peace, wasn’t beyond her. Like King, she called out for equality. Like King, she called out for freedom. But for Smith, the challenge was rendered all the more clear by a burden bearing down on her in that very building.

“Across this country they sing ‘lift every voice,’” she said, yet it echoes through houses of mercy that would see her, a lesbian leader of Equality Florida, condemned.

King, a Baptist minister at odds with the time in which he was born, yet in harmony with a future he would usher forth, asked for freedom for all when it had become increasingly difficult to come by.

His task carried a far heavier burden than simply liberating his own race. He saw liberation from the pains of all people. He saw beyond healing his own pain, and sought to heal all inequality.

The morning after King was assassinated in 1968, he would have trodden the streets of Memphis followed by garbage workers seeking better working conditions. Eight days later, those 1,300 workers saw their rights recognized.

King set men free, even beyond his time.

But as nearly half a century has passed in the blurry wake of King’s death, our vision of freedom has become muddled. In many ways, King’s struggles remain our own. Though blacks have freedom to vote, freedom from segregation and seemingly equal rights among men, all men (and women) do not yet have equal rights.

The oppression of ignorance continues today, and en masse, for fear of a burgeoning world that welcomes gays as equals rather than lowly outcasts.

But that ignorance doesn’t just lie in the shadows, making decisions in our subconscious and behind closed doors with unmixed company. In increasing numbers, we find ignorance growing not by some unseen subversion of the mind, but through the outward celebration of it.

Politicians — our elected leaders — have in recent years capitalized upon ignorance and hate as tools for fomenting more of the same. It’s a process that feeds into itself with horrifying efficiency.

While King and Smith asked us to draw from, and celebrate the better angels of our nature, all too frequently we see a larger stage given to those who would advocate fear of the worst in all of us and pre-emptive protection against the potential legitimization of those fears.

In ignorance, we are given no regard for a better future. Ignorance and the status quo are frequently intertwined; absent the understanding for what good could come of progress and civility, we fear that any change will invariably degenerate our fate.

In America’s history, that has never been the case. We are a nation that always marches forward, regardless of impediments to progress. We are a nation born of division and that survived its own potential fracture during the Civil War to become ever more united as equals in gender in 1920, equals in social security beginning in the 1930s and equals in race in the 1960s.

But in the last half century, the grip of ignorance and fear has slowed us again. For Smith, and gays who struggle for their own civil rights, the day of liberation has yet to come.

We all pay a price for that bondage, for in America, our destinies have never been inextricable. But freedom, that very American word, has continued to precede caveats to that united destiny.

If we cannot grant freedom for all, then we all remain indefinite prisoners of our own fears. If we are not all free, then none of us is free.

“There are those that are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied?” King said. “We can never be satisfied.”