Black Freedom

A winter sunrise over Baltimore. (Clicking on the picture enlarges it.)
I topped off Martin Luther King Day and Inauguration Day with the movie Lincoln.  The combination brought home profoundly and with tears how far African Americans had come from the 13th amendment to the March on Washington to the beginning of the second term of a black president.
When I was a child in the market staring at the only black woman in town, a servant to two old maiden ladies, my father told me explicitly that "she is just the same as you."  In a nearby town which had more blacks, they could sit in only one small section of the local movie house.  In the whole county I don't think there was one restaurant that didn't "reserve the right to serve whom they pleased."
In 1950 when my aunt bought property on the lake where I now live, her deed specified that she could not re-sell the property "to negroes."  During the 50's in a Baltimore seminary there were many students and even some priests who disliked blacks, even though we had one in our class.  It was there, however, that I was encouraged to build on my father's insistence that blacks were my equal.  When I was ordained in 1962 a young black man from Baltimore was ordained in the same ceremony, but for a diocese in Alabama, because the previous archbishop of Baltimore would not accept black men to study for the priesthood.
When I preached about racial integration in my first parish in central Maryland some parishioners got up and walked out.  I joined the NAACP and worked to integrate housing.  I went with several car loads of members to the March on Washington.  Curiously, I went in my own car with the only other white man.  Prejudices still remaining?
Even in 1969 a self-appointed minister from Texas preached in a park in east Baltimore that we should hang all blacks from the nearest lamp post.  I had been asked to go with several other priests to mix in with the mostly Catholic crowd to try to keep them from rioting.  People spit at us and said, "I'm a Catholic, Father, but I hate n...."
I am grateful to God for how far I've come and how far our country has come in realizing the "Dream" that Martin Luther King proclaimed so eloquently from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  We still have far to go.