Diversity is a beautiful thing. Without diversity, every person would look and act exactly the same. There wouldn’t be extraordinary people, such as Martin Luther King Jr. There wouldn’t be an array of differences that we experience in the United States. There wouldn’t be anything new to learn about other people. Everyone would be the same; everyone would be average. The United States is one of the most diverse countries in terms of race in the population. This diversity is awe-inspiring.
Although I believe that diversity is beautiful, not many people shared my opinions just a few years ago. There was segregation separating Blacks and the Whites. If there was color to your skin, it was dangerous to associate or communicate with a White person and vice versa. A famous example of this danger is the story of Emmett Till. In 1955, Emmett Till was a young African-American boy who at the age of 14 was brutally murdered in Mississippi for flirting with an older White woman. Two White men forced him from his uncle’s home, beat him, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, and disposed of his body.
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about the hardships Blacks went through on a day-to-day basis in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” He wrote, “But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your Black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to Colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward White people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; when your first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and your wife and mother are never given the respected title ‘Mrs.’; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”
I completely understand why King stood up for what he believed in. I’m honestly glad that I was brought up in the day and age that I was, because I couldn’t imagine what those people went through. Our nation is not perfect, but we have made steps towards bettering it and becoming more tolerant of others.
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