Some Thoughts on MLK Day

I usually spend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. day thinking about my relatives that came before me. I've never been one for ancestral worship, but when I do online research on my family, I'm struck by how different our lives were. I've read their census records. They lived on farms, listed their occupations as "laborer," and some didn't read or write. My great-great aunts and uncles lived 13 people to a tiny house in which rent was only $11 a month. In a later generation, my parents lived in the Jim Crow south. As a child without the capacity to understand, I groaned listening to their stories, with a flippant "who cares!" that turned into a reverence in adulthood. As my sister's Instagram post reminded me, we even visited MLK's grave when we were little, and we dressed up to do it. I'm sure I knew it was important, but I probably didn't know why.

Now when I think about MLK and the Black people that lived before me, I think about the way they fought and suffered so that people that look like me can work white collar jobs. When I sit on my rear bingeing Netflix or complain, my ancestors whisper: don't waste this opportunity. Other times they say: pick up where we left off.