Dr. King’s Legacy

Will this nation ever stop segregating its heroes by race and ethnicity? Will Cesar Chavez ever be remembered as more than a hero to Latinos and farm workers? Will there be a time when this day that commemorates Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is no longer viewed as a holiday for African Americans? Perhaps, but not yet, and here is an example of why.

The naming of a school is almost always a matter of routine and seldom questioned. Certainly that was the case in Riverside when the Board of Education named Amelia Earhart Middle School and William Howard Taft, Benjamin Franklin and Toms Rivera elementaries. The latter honored the first Latino chancellor of UC Riverside.

But things changed when the Riverside board decided to give Dr. King’s name to a new high school in the city’s Orangecrest district, a predominantly white area. Suddenly, some parents decided that it was time to honor Riverside’s citrus history. More to the point were the words of others to the King proposal: This can’t be done, this will hurt our children, college admissions offices will think that it’s a black school.

Interesting, in a time that talks of a colorblind society, that some parents could come to the conclusion there would be stigma attached to a school whose mere name suggested it might be predominantly black.

For the right reasons, the Riverside school board voted unanimously to name the school for Dr. King, but much vitriol remains on the matter. Perhaps the incident is symptomatic of the fact that some Americans refuse to view King as an American hero, even though he won the Nobel Peace Prize and fought for a quintessentially American goal: equality and justice for all.

You’ll hear, instead, from those who seek to diminish his accomplishments, that he was a womanizer, a plagiarist. That’s curious in a country with a penchant for rationalizing and forgiving faults, like those of the early American presidents who were slaveholders.

It’s a measure of how far this nation has yet to go when so many would diminish King, an icon in life and death in the struggle for civil and human rights.