There is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts. She, like we, saw the horrifying conditions of ghetto life. Like we, she knew that all of society is poisoned by cancerous slums. Like we, she was a direct actionist — a nonviolent resister. She was willing to accept scorn and abuse until the truth she saw was revealed to the millions. At the turn of the century she went into the slums and set up a birth control clinic, and for this deed she went to jail because she was violating an unjust law. Yet the years have justified her actions. She launched a movement which is obeying a higher law to preserve human life under humane conditions.With the second inauguration falling on the MLK Day observance, there's no shortage of painful ironies. They're in the president's pursuit of policies antithetical to Dr. King's philosophy. And his very presence in office is used by the usual suspects to claim the country has moved beyond race. Just as the Right (and its media enablers) promotes a fake version of MLK's message as one of mere color-blindness, not social justice.
Still, history refused to be past; not when the inauguration and MLK Day included this:
Down in the Gold section, everybody was quiet, and you could hear that great river moving again under everything, a history that this country too often resists, but that is irresistable because of the great contradictions within which this country was born. Myrlie Evers-Williams was the first person ever to give an invocation at a presidential inauguration who wasn't a preacher. Didn't matter. Down in the Gold section, they knew who had won and who had lost, and what had triumphed, and what had been defeated, They knew grace when it fell on them.
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