The Rev. Martin Luther King's dream fulfilled
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
She was born a few months after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave one of the most enduring speeches ever given in America, what is known as the “I Have a Dream” speech, August of 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
It is a 17-minute speech that will be heard again Monday, the way it has been heard for nearly 50 years, and this was just part of it that day: “We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama grew up in a two-story house on Euclid Ave. in Chicago’s South Side area, in a second-floor apartment her parents rented from her aunt. The father was a water plant employee, and the mother had a job at Spiegel’s, and later the girl’s round-trip commute to a magnet school on Chicago’s West Side took her nearly three hours.
Her great-great-grandfather was a slave in South Carolina, and all this time later, in a life that began less than five months after a speech from the Rev. King that was like a hymn to the possibilities of America, she has gone from Euclid
Ave. to Princeton to the White House, where she celebrates her 48th birthday Tuesday as the First Lady of the United States.
And as her husband is already well into a well-funded campaign to keep his job — the country's first African-American President has become the Yankees of American politics — he does not have an asset better than his wife, who somehow is still called “uppity” by slobs in the media who laugh and say it is just a word instead of the cheap racial insult that it is.
There is a new book out called “The Obamas,” written by Jodi Kantor of The Times, and even though the First Lady says she has not read it, has only seen accounts of how she fought for her husband and with members of his staff, she went on television with Gayle King and said this:
“That’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack announced, that I’m some angry black woman. I just try to be me and my hope is that, over time, people get to know me, and they get to judge me for me.”
The ones who hate her husband and hate her by association loved that a lot, because of the word “black,” as if the First Lady of the country is the one who brought race into all this, as if it has not provided the nasty subtext to so much of the discussion about the Obamas from the start. As if they weren’t supposed to notice.
Michelle Obama has been better than all of this from the start,
whatever you think of her husband’s job performance or his prospects for
keeping his job, a strong, confident, graceful woman, as much a partner
to him as Hillary Clinton
was to her husband when he was President. It is worth remembering all
that Monday, worth talking about her great American story on Martin
Luther King Day.
And here was another kind of American story on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Newt Gingrich talking with a straight face about “values, character, behavior,” attacking Mitt Romney again, saying that voters need to know “what values (candidates like Romney) bring to the Oval Office.” Of course. Talk about the other guy. Because when you ask what values Gingrich, that smug phony, would bring to the Oval Office, the answer is simple:
None.
Gingrich has a dream, but not about a better America, just about his own pigheaded ambition. And Michelle Obama is called uppity.
On Sunday, the First Family attended church services at the Zion Baptist Church, founded in 1864 by African-Americans who migrated to Washington from Fredericksburg, Va. The pastor is the Rev. Keith Byrd Sr., who spoke passionately on this day about King.
“Be a source of hope,” Byrd said to the Obamas — and everyone else in the congregation.
You don’t have to want a second term for Barack Obama. You don’t have to like him, or his wife, or his politics. But on Martin Luther King Day 2012, you better know that the America that King spoke of so eloquently so long ago, the one he saw from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that America is one where you start out black on Euclid Ave. in Chicago in the ’60s and celebrate a birthday in the White House nearly a half-century later.
And here was another kind of American story on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Newt Gingrich talking with a straight face about “values, character, behavior,” attacking Mitt Romney again, saying that voters need to know “what values (candidates like Romney) bring to the Oval Office.” Of course. Talk about the other guy. Because when you ask what values Gingrich, that smug phony, would bring to the Oval Office, the answer is simple:
None.
Gingrich has a dream, but not about a better America, just about his own pigheaded ambition. And Michelle Obama is called uppity.
On Sunday, the First Family attended church services at the Zion Baptist Church, founded in 1864 by African-Americans who migrated to Washington from Fredericksburg, Va. The pastor is the Rev. Keith Byrd Sr., who spoke passionately on this day about King.
“Be a source of hope,” Byrd said to the Obamas — and everyone else in the congregation.
You don’t have to want a second term for Barack Obama. You don’t have to like him, or his wife, or his politics. But on Martin Luther King Day 2012, you better know that the America that King spoke of so eloquently so long ago, the one he saw from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, that America is one where you start out black on Euclid Ave. in Chicago in the ’60s and celebrate a birthday in the White House nearly a half-century later.
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