Last week my kids started another year of school. Today is the anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. On this day in 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr spoke to more than 200,000 people from the steps of the Lincoln Monument. I remember the first time I heard excerpts of the speech. I felt a chill, even though I was a child.
When I heard the speech years later, I still felt motivated. The speech doesn't grow stale. It feels timeless, perhaps because the images are in black and white, or because so many of the issues are still relevant. Since I live in California, I wanted to visit the steps of the Lincoln Monument. The site was even more significant knowing that three months later, President Kennedy would be assassinated. Five years later, Martin and Kennedy's brother Senator Robert Kennedy would be killed. Lincoln had also been assassinated more than one hundred years earlier.
In 2016, I visited the Lincoln Memorial on the 151st anniversary of Lincoln's assassination. The memorial for Lincoln did not seem to memorialize the day he was killed... at least not on the day, which probably just means that I am a little more obsessed with those things than most people.
Last week my children started another year of school. This year, my kids left their mother's place in Alameda and biked to Lincoln Middle School. (I assume the school is named after President Lincoln.) It's a fine public school, but I wonder how much this little decision to leave the dual immersion Oakland public school conflicts with Martin Luther King's dream. I miss their old school and old first days. (After I photographed them, I spent the morning at their old school.)
If I have seemed complimentary about our current President, it is because I compare him to most Americans and our little decisions, like the one that sent my white kids to a school that is more white. Many White Americans do not see themselves as racists. We might not even be racists, but we often make decisions that have the same outcome, "because we want what is best for our own kids." For example, instead of sending our kids to the school that is predominantly #notthewhitewerelookingfor, we find a different (better) school. But we won't send our kids to school with immigrants, or English Language Learners or students with disabilities or poor (er) kids... we wouldn't do those things, because we aren't like Trump. We are the good whites. We have a dream. we dream bigly.
