I found the text of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech today to read to the kids – I hadn’t realized that Isaiah 40’s picture of the fruition of the Kingdom of God is directly quoted. I’ve quoted the “I have a dream” portion of the text below, but wanted to make a few comments:

First, because of the historical context of the speech–desegregation of schools was less than a decade old, and had not been fully implemented in some places, and Jim Crow laws were still on the books in many places, particularly in the Deep South–the speech is oriented as a call to the South to change. While this was appropriate, we need to remember today that this is not a “Southern problem.” As a child of New Englanders raised in Georgia the narrative we tended to use saw the North as “not-racist” and the South as “racist.” There was certainly more “on the books” in the South, and there were bigger hurdles to cross, legally, in the South, but racism is a human problem born of fallen human beings trying to build their identity in their tribe. The reality that we are beings made in God’s image and for His glory is out-of-accord with our experience of suffering and our own causing others to suffer–but to admit the need for something beyond ourselves strikes our pride, so we begin to insert other identities and narratives that make us feel better–like “I’m better than you because I’m racially different from you.” The pastor of our anchor church, Preston Graham at Christ Presbyterian Church, New Haven, had an excellent sermon examining this dynamic yesterday that you can find here.

That human problem–racism–wasn’t and isn’t limited to the South. Northern whites exercised and exercise racist attitudes toward blacks though at a less institutional level than happened in the Jim Crow South. That is not to say that institutional racism did not exist: in our town of Milford, CT, as well as many towns along the Connecticut coast, we used residence-only beach parking permits, or parking permits for non-residents that could only be purchased during limited week-day hours to prevent blacks from New York City from using our beaches. While this could be understood as a residents vs non-residents issue rather than a racial narrative, Edward T. O’Donnell, host of the podcast “In the Past Lane,” makes a good argument for the explicit racial nature of this problem in this interview with Historian Andrew W. Kahrl about his book, Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline.

In our denomination we saw this difficulty during an action at our General Assembly in 2016 to repent of sin in our denomination’s past with regard to the Civil Rights Movement: I heard a number of Southern pastors confess how their churches had hurt African American communities in their cities and how formal, institutional repentance was needed to address that. I also heard several Northern pastors say, essentially, ‘this is something we’ve dealt with or weren’t part of, let’s move on.’ Those of us in Northern churches who are white need to not let Martin Luther King Day be a time when we look south and say “those people did bad things.” We need to examine our own attitudes and look for where we are placing our identity in some form of white tribalism rather than admitting our brokenness and, by the power of Christ in us, repent and embrace our African American brothers and sisters.

The second point I’d like to make has to do with a beautiful book called Grandmama’s Pride by Becky Birtha (illustrated by Colin Bootman). We read it to the kids this morning and it’s a great way of introducing children to Civil Rights history. My two criticisms are that the book focuses on the narrative of racism as a Southern problem (see above), and that the last line of the book is, “Those days are over.” This suggests that the problem the Civil Rights Movement was addressing is essentially solved. It is wonderful and appropriate to celebrate the change that last line specifically refers to: that discrimination can no longer be written into law (separate white and black water fountains, restrooms, waiting rooms; whites only businesses, etc.). That said, we don’t want Martin Luther King Day to be a celebration of what has been accomplished only. There is still much work to do in racial reconciliation. The reality that we are in our essence ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave