America still falls short of King’s dream

THE ISSUE Hawaii and the the rest of the country honors the memory of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

CONGRESS took 15 years following the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. before making the civil-rights leader's birthday a national holiday. Hawaii's Legislature made it a state holiday in 1989 and Arizona made it unanimous across the promised land three years later. With each year, the nation comes closer to fulfilling his dream.

The young congressman who introduced the measure making the third Monday of January a commemoration of King's birthday was John Conyers of Michigan, now chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. That and other advances still fall short of the King's dream that everyone be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

The recent emergence of a Hawaii-born U.S. senator who was 6 years old at the time of King's assassination has brought the dream a step closer to reality. Sen. Barack Obama, whose enormous attraction seems to cross racial lines as if they no longer exist, riveted the 2004 Democratic National Convention about the audacity of hope for "a skinny kid with a funny name who believes America has a place for him, too."

Discrimination continues, however subtle. Yolanda King told a Florida audience last week that remembrance of her father "forces us to take a look at ourselves and ask if there are prejudices our own hearts might be harboring."