February

Martin Luther King Jr. Day—Third Monday in January

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. Galatians 3:28

It was in the year 1968 that President Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act, also known as the Fair Housing Act. That watershed law prohibited any form of discrimination with housing because of “race, color, religion, or national origin.” It was also in 1968, on April 4th, that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. His death in many ways led to a fragmentation and dissolution of the Civil Rights Movement. Since his death, there has not been another single leader with his unifying ability.

Patt and I also look back to 1968 as the official founding of our ministry, The New Directions. As an interdenominational, interracial, contemporary ministry group, we were using music to take to the streets as a positive demonstration of racial reconciliation in Christ. For the next 20 years, we made loving invasions into every bastion of segregation, prejudice, and racism in the South and North. We called our events an “Action Experience in Christian Love.”

Since those defining years of desegregation, a new generation of Americans has grown up with little or no personal experience of the Civil Rights Era. For many of them, it is abstract ancient history. But the new generation is painfully learning what earlier generations learned: while you can and should pass legislation against discrimination, you cannot legislate a change of heart.

All of us are prejudiced to one degree or another. By virtue of the original sin that we all inherited through our common human father, Adam, we have prejudice against other humans because of our innate sin and selfishness. We also all have residual racism by culture, conditioning, and choice. None of us is totally color-blind.

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