A Single Garment of Destiny: In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A few years ago, during a visit to Israel, I got to visit Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, as well as see my Aunt Rena, who lives in Jerusalem. A survivor of the Holocaust, my Aunt’s entire family in Poland was murdered by the Nazis. The visit impressed upon me the imperative of both never forgetting and never remaining silent in the face of injustice and evil.

In that context, it’s worth noting the words of another Holocaust survivor, Eli Wiesel: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Where men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

Those words, in my view, remain as relevant today as when Wiesel first penned them. Indeed, injustice, racism, discrimination is an age-old problem, one that necessitates that we—indeed—take sides.

I was born two days after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. Family lore holds that my mom had a difficult time pulling my dad away from Kennedy’s funeral, televised from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, to get him to take her to the hospital. To state the obvious, it all turned out fine, and my father can be forgiven for attempting to delay the trip to the hospital for my birth to listen to Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for his brother, remembered as one of the great speeches of the 20th century. It ended with Bobby’s own words, “Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.” Those words have inspired me throughout my own lifetime.

Equally if not more inspiring, however, was the impromptu eulogy that Bobby Kennedy gave just two months earlier in Indianapolis for Martin Luther King, Jr, who was assassinated on the 4th of April in Memphis. During brief remarks, Kennedy spoke of Dr. King’s dedication of his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings, and his death in the cause of that effort. Kennedy noted, that “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be White or whether they be Black.” And he quoted from Aeschylus some of my favorite lines of poetry:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

until, in our own despair,

against our will,

comes wisdom

through the awful grace of God.

In some ways, the injustice is still as real today as it was when in 1963 Dr. King wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to eight Alabama clergymen, considered by some to be the most important written document of the civil rights era. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King wrote. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere in this country.”

One could argue perhaps that continuing injustice is not so surprising since while we are a nation founded on the noble proposition that all men are created equal, our Founders were referring to white men; indeed, for purposes of representation in Congress, enslaved Blacks in a state would be counted as three-fifths of the number of white inhabitants of that state.

But that view would be rejecting the progress made over the past quarter century since this nation was born as we've strived to continually form a "more perfect union,” as well as the millions across our nation of all race, creed, and color who struggled and sacrificed, lived and died, to secure such progress.

But still, so much more to do.

So, as we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. King this weekend, we should take a moment for contemplation, for education, for empathy, for compassion, for listening, for understanding, but above all, a moment, to take sides. To take sides in the hope that, in the spirit of Wiesel, Kennedy, and Dr. King, picking a side, taking a stand will ultimately heal the divisions across our nation, and bind us as one people into that single garment of destiny.