Those days were hopeful, in part, because the lessons of the rise and fall of Nazism, and the general prosperity that followed Word War II, made the idea that this country could face the shame of slavery, and the hundred unsettling years which followed the war which reulted in the end of slavery, and move toward an equality worthy of the ideals on which this nation was founded. There were many heroes of the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, including ordinary citizens such as Rosa Parks, James Meredith, Charlayne Hunter and James Chaney who did truly heroic things, and, in Chaney's case as well as so many others (including the children murdered by the bombing of a church in Birmingham) , gave their lives to make their lives and those of others better. Many were not immediate victims of the racial prejudice which followed the end of slavery also contributed and they include not just the great federal judge Frank Johnson, and attorney Charles Morgan, but Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and, yes, Johnson and, of course, Michael (Mikey) Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were both murdered with Chaney in June, 1964.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., gave, of course, more than just his voice, or his life for this cause. He was, by the force of his great skills as a communicator, the human embodiment of the righteousness of that cause. For every Orville Faubus, or Lester Maddox or Strom Thurmond or George Wallace who tried to make segregation sound as if it, and not the equal protection of the laws, were what the Constitution mandated, there was that eloquence in appearance, demeanor and cadence, which shattered that fiction every time Dr. King appeared on our television, and in our cities.

By 1968, however, the darker forces that are always amongst us, had taken hold in some places, justifying themselves by the assassination of a president who knew what the next steps were and what had to be done. They were right in some ways: the civil rights laws enacted in the 1950s, (championed, by the way by, among others, Senator Prescott Bush, whose grandson seems to identify more with Senator Bush's 1940s association with Nazi owned companies in Germany than the civil rights he supported in the 1950s) were baby steps that did not go far enough but resisted to the point that President Eisenhower had to involve federal troops to enforce them.

The Civil Rights Law of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act passed the next year were enacted over those protests as much in honor of the memory of the president murdered in 1963 (a death applauded by many who opposed civil rights) and so it seemed that progress could not be accomplished by nonviolence, as Dr King urged, but only by force.

On the date that Dr King's life was given to that cause, indeed, his stature was under attack by those who felt his course was no longer working and that a new and radical direction was required. It is paradoxical that his assassination, and that of Senator Kennedy a few months later, changed much of that thinking and now we celebrate his birthday in way we celebrate that of no other American other than two presidents. Yet today, forty years since his death we still await that day "when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

Enjoy the [day], but listen to this sometime even if you have heard it before. It's worth it