His father's dream unfulfilled:
Martin Luther King, III, speaks at UB commemoration

By JOHN LAVELLE
Reporter Contributor

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., mesmerized the 250,000 people who came to Washington in 1963 to hear him talk about his dream for America.

But more than 30 years later, the eldest son of the slain civil-rights leader told a UB audience that that dream has been deferred.

"My father's dream has not been realized...that day has not yet arrived," Martin Luther King, III, told the crowd attending his keynote address at the 23rd annual Martin Luther King, Jr., Commemoration held on Feb. 25 in the Mainstage theater in the Center for the Arts.

King, who was only 10 years old when his father was murdered in 1968 as he stood on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tenn., said his father had felt that racism was the nation's greatest moral dilemma. And it remains so today. "It has the potential to destroy us," he said, calling racism, along with poverty and violence, an "old dog."

"The dog may look kinder and gentler, but it's still the same old dog," he said. "We are a better nation than the behavior we are exhibiting."

King earlier in the day told reporters attending a press conference in the Center for Tomorrow that incidents such as the dragging death of a black man by several white men in Jasper, Texas, point out that racism remains a critical problem in America.

"Poverty, we know, proportionately has grown; violence is at epidemic levels and racism is certainly on the horizon," he said. "We never could have envisioned that we would be dealing with an incident like (the one that occurred in) Jasper, Texas, at this particular time in our history. We thought that kind of incident we had put behind us."

King, who serves as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization his father co-founded during the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s, said he was opposed to the execution of James William King, the man convicted in the Jasper murder. "My position has always been-and my family's position, we have always been, as Christians, I should say-that killing is not the answer. I have been against the death penalty," King said.

There is a growing element of racism in the nation, he noted, citing paramilitary groups and hate talk radio as "tilling the soil for hatred." He added that he believes that hatred is something that does not happen accidentally, but that is "programmed" into young people.

King suggested that one of the ways to change the problems of injustice, inequality and hatred is to change the curriculum of history studies in the schools. History, he said, is being taught from a Western European point of view, and it would be better to teach children about the long and ancient history of the Native American, as well as African-American, Asian and Latino history.

"Every racial group has made a significant contribution to this nation," he said, adding that although all ethnic groups came to this country on different boats, "We are all in the same boat now, called America. If we stop perpetuating the things that divide us and start acknowledging the things that link us, we can move towards realizing the dreams that Martin Luther King, Jr. , dreamed."