Sixty years? It can’t be. That would make me an old lady. Oh dear. But that’s all true.
Sixty years ago today, August 28, 1963, at twenty-three-years old, I was standing in the middle of over 250,000 people listening to a man who was courageously saying what we all had in our minds and hearts. “I Have a Dream.”
With that many people making the effort to get to Washington D.C., all with the collective vision of a true democracy in which all people were equal, one would think equality would advance. And so, some has. But not nearly enough. It’s hard to believe, almost every day, and even as of yesterday, that racism is still blatantly occurring. Another racially motivated murder. From the taking of life itself, to employment, to economic and educational opportunity, and to voting rights, little progress has been made for people of color.
My journey to that event was on a crowded bus from Ann Arbor, Michigan to Washington, D.C. with fifty-seven people of varying ages and race, all with hope in our hearts that we could make a difference. I knew several of them, but the others were strangers, people with whom I felt an immediate familiarity. Moving about in the aisle of the bus, we all eventually introduced ourselves. A strong bond can form when several people find themselves on a shared mission. Most of them were students or faculty at the University of Michigan. Some were familiar faces I had seen in 1960 at the library on campus when JFK came and introduced the idea of a Peace Corps. And, later, in 1965, the same faces were on the campus Diag for anti-Vietnam war peace protests.
As it has been said, many times, our generation was one of hope and a need to make a difference. To bring about change. But now, as an old lady, facing each day and trying to be hopeful in a world that is full of discrimination, social injustices, inequality, and anger, it’s hard to capture that youthful, buoyant, optimism of that day we climbed back into the bus to return to Ann Arbor.
All this said, we can not quit. We must keep trying.