{"id":3802,"date":"2010-01-18T06:00:49","date_gmt":"2010-01-18T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=3802"},"modified":"2010-01-18T06:25:13","modified_gmt":"2010-01-18T11:25:13","slug":"the-future-of-the-american-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/01\/18\/the-future-of-the-american-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"the future of the American experiment…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It seems like it was such a long time ago – Martin Luther King’s assassination – well over half my life ago. King had come to Memphis to march with the striking sanitation workers. It was a difficult time. LBJ had passed the Civil Rights Legislation, and the South was in turmoil as "forced" integration and school busing turned our part of the world upside down. King had expanded the Civil Rights Movement into  a war on poverty, into the anti-war movement, and the country was exploding. King’s non-violent approach was being challenged by Black Power and Malcolm X. Those of us in Memphis knew just how explosive it was. We had just elected a conservative Mayor who was unwilling to negotiate with the strikers and the tensions were palpable.<\/p>\n

It was a polarized, angry time. And it doesn’t feel like we’ve ever really escaped from the divisiveness of those days. While Dr. King has become an American Icon as he should have, the symbol is different from the man of the times. I expect that’s always true. History can be a strange judge – almost always simplifying the character based on their overall impact. In the case of people like Martin Luther King, history has been forgiving. At the time of his death, his movement felt like it was drowning in the sea of violence that flooded the country.<\/p>\n

But it didn’t. And in spite of the continued racist trends in America today and the chaos of those days, the South I live in now is remarkably different from the one I grew up in – changes in large measure built on the movement that Martin Luther King galvanized – hard to imagine in those days. Like Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King literally made the future of the American experiment possible…<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It seems like it was such a long time ago – Martin Luther King’s assassination – well over half my life ago. King had come to Memphis to march with the striking sanitation workers. It was a difficult time. LBJ had passed the Civil Rights Legislation, and the South was in turmoil as "forced" integration […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}