Fifty years of progress, but still much work to be done

In one respect, I write this for my children and grandchildren, who may or may not be surprised to learn that there was a time in this country when black people were treated as less than human.

Or maybe they won't be surprised at all. They live in an era where conservatives seem to want to take us back to the pre-civil rights era.

It was 50 years ago this weekend that Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech before more than 250,000 people in Washington, D.C. The America of which he spoke was one where restaurants and hotels could still legally discriminate on the basis of race, one in which discrimination prevented people from even voting in most of the South.

It was the next year when the Civil Rights Act banned much discrimination, and it was 1965 when the right to vote was guaranteed for all who were eligible.

Some folks would have you believe that discrimination ended then, but of course it didn't.

Discrimination outlived Dr. King, who was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., in April 1968. I'll never forget the night. I was in a dormitory in Charlottesville, Va., studying a lot of stuff that I never really learned. A kid came running down the hall shouting happily that "Martin Luther Coon had been killed in Tennessee."

It was strange. I didn't think of that particular kid as a particularly vicious racist. But at that point in 1968, there were probably more kids in my dorm pleased by the news than appalled by it.

There were no riots on our campus. In fact, there weren't very many black students at the University of Virginia in 1968. It was still very conservative and very Southern, and as much as I loved things about it, starting my college travels there was one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

Who could cheer the death of someone who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? At least at that point, Henry Kissinger and Yasir Arafat were still in the future.

But Dr. King spoke of good things. He spoke of peace between the races and of judging people by their character instead of what they looked like.

How could anyone argue with that? Well, there were plenty of poor white people who were pretty much at the bottom of the ladder, and the only thing they had going for them -- in their minds -- was that they were not black.

They didn't want to hear that black people were just as good as they were.

At the grass roots, a great deal of that has changed. I live just outside a small, relatively poor Georgia city. Anytime I drive downtown, I drive through a pretty bad black neighborhood. But one thing I have noticed here in Griffin, Ga., is that I have never seen so many interracial couples with beautiful coffee-colored kids.

Probably the worst discrimination in our part of the country is from conservative politicians. Before civil rights, they were Democrats known as Dixiecrats. Now most of them are Republicans, and when I voted last November, once I got past president, eight of the nine offices on the ballot were Republicans running unopposed.

The demographics are slipping away from them, and in numerous states Republicans are working very hard to make it more difficult for minorities and young people to vote.

But times do change. In the late '50s, people said they thought civil rights would come, but not for another generation. A lot of people spoke of gradualism, but truly, if you're ending something that is wrong, how can you be gradual about it.

Dr. King died at the age of 39. If he had lived to 79, he would have seen a black man elected president of the United States, but in the years after that, he would have seen a lot of racists resurfacing to say horrible things about that president.

I don't need to repeat those things.

We celebrate the 50th anniversary of a wonderful speech by a great American this weekend, and we celebrate 50 years of progress by our country as well.

But it is also important that we tell the people of the other side, the people who never wanted there to be civil rights, four little words.

"WE'RE NOT GOING BACK."