Kasper, Kody: Diversity

For as long as I have known about slavery I felt it was a bad thing, under which no human need suffer.  That sort of total obedience and agony is not meant for anyone. While I knew it was wrong, it still did not really affect me at all. My family did not have slaves of any kind; we were the extra ‘poor white folk’ who could not afford a plantation. My grandpa was a cotton farmer, he had children and, after, grandchildren that worked for him. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had the right to voice his opinion and make motions and protests for what he believed in because he lived through it. All I am is an outsider looking back at a past with which I have no emotional connection. The fact that the clergymen had the audacity to tell Martin Luther King that they would handle desegregation as a community and that they all wanted equal treatment for Blacks when they were really all for segregation.  They believed if you were not White and a man that you had no rights. Martin Luther King knew that this was total bullshit and thus did not give up his cause and fight for equality. Being described as an outsider only gave him more reason to battle the age of discrimination. He was serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which gave him as much right to be there as the community members themselves. The clergymen who had the nerve to tell all the citizens, Black and White alike, that they should not listen or participate in his ‘outsider’ ways. That was just adding to Martin Luther King’s point, that the discrimination was too much of an issue for the community to solve on their own. The issue of slavery is still fairly high on some people’s minds; discrimination is still a major factor in today’s society. If Martin Luther King was not assassinated, perhaps we would have appreciated  diversity sooner. Maybe we would be able to not stereotype and to profile our fellow citizens so readily, and  maybe America would be a tighter-knit country.