Today, I am not going to blog on the subject of divorce in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This is a portion of a post I made in 2008:
As a child, I was taught by my mother that a person’s color, nationality, religion, political viewpoint, wealth or social standing should not bear any weight in the friend selecting process or in human rights.
I went to my first two years of college in Georgia. I became friends with a girl in my dorm. She was black. She and I would talk about racism and I remember telling her that, I knew how she felt. She asked me if I ever needed to use a restroom and had seen the signs that said, “Ladies, Gentlemen and Negroes?”
I remember thinking that I needed to make a difference for her and every black person alive. Shortly thereafter, sometime in the early 70′s, there happened to be a civil rights march to Atlanta. The march was broadcast on TV and my very bigoted father almost had heart failure as he watched the national news and saw his little long blond haired daughter marching to Atlanta with “colored people” singing, “We shall overcome.”
I remember that the president of my college called me in afterward. He said to me, “Claudia, our girls do not maach!” “Oh yes they do,” I thought.
Years later, I was a supervisor in an airline reservations office, and two agents came to me a few days prior to, what is now, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. They plead with me to help them get the day off. They were so passionate about their request that I went in to the powers that be and fought for their cause.
At first, their wish was denied but I kept fighting for them because they were not “just trying to get a day off.” They were in pain because of the loss of such an unbelievable leader and they wanted to honor him.
Finally, I was permitted to give them the day off but only if they made the day up. I felt good about what I had accomplished because it was unheard of at the time. Little did any of us know that his birthday would become a national holiday. I take pride every year as that special day approaches because I feel like I made a difference and contributed in some tiny way to honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Photo: Mike Licht
