What Martin Luther King Jr. Day Means

My apologies for the not a lot of activity around here lately.  I did come across something that made me want to jump into a few posts, though.  First:

Q: You really don't talk about the Black experience a lot.  Why not?

A: I generally consider myself well-informed as to the details of said experience, but I am intimidated by my overall lack of specialized knowledge therein.  I like to do topics of posting some amount of justice, which leads to perfectionism, which leads to putting off posting.  That said, my recent love affair with gobbling up every last detail of everything Southern has started to lead me into a lot of reading on the Black experience.  It's not a world entirely foreign to me either; I have a fair degree of involvement in religious ministry in Rochester, NY and Detroit, MI where I can definitely say I got immersed in various facets of the Black experience.  One of the most amazing features I came across was the prevalence of town hall style democratic participation, something that one would figure is entirely absent from any large developed areas and relegated mostly to the land of small farming towns in Indiana or Iowa. 

The two mentalities are not so different that they have never existed in unison; most Black people living in the United States and Canada, at least before the Second World War, were agriculturally focused and lived in smaller communities.  The first Black people seeking a better life in Canada settled not in Kingston or Montreal but in Amherstburg (just south of Windsor, Ontario) or in Oro-Medonte, a largely rural community about an hour and change north of Toronto.  In the United States, before employers like Ford attracted many Black people through equal pay and hiring opportunity, racial demographics were spread pretty even between rural and urban areas; cities were often full of struggling immigrants who were often responsible for creating discriminatory conditions no better than in the more timid parts of the South.  This might have been due to a distaste for even more competition in addition to any racism passed on the other groups already living here by such times.

This was nothing compared to what Black people were dealing with in the South, however.  Read the following article to get a taste of just what that meant, and just what yesterday's public holiday means:

http://m.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/29/1011562/-Most-of-you-have-no-idea-what-Martin-Luther-King-actually-did

It's sobering, to say the least.  It puts things into perspective, like the question "Why don't I talk about the Black experience a lot?"  I decided to wait a day until posting this so the hysteria of everyone wanting to post about it died down and we could look at things from a vantage of reality over popularity.