MLK Jr. day

It was the summer of ‘67 when I visited my cousin’s host family outside Chicago where she lived when she came to the U.S. as a high school exchange student from San Esteban, Ilocos Sur of Pea Eye. My coz’ Caucasian sister later became a “rebel” student dropping out of the U-C campus of the University of Illinois where she skipped her elder sisters’ Sorority tradition, and dated a black guy from Washington, D.C. to symbolize her lily-white upbringing in Glen Ellyn as inadequate.

Bill Ayers, co-founder of the radical Weatherman Organization was a member of her church, raised in her neighborhood, his Dad a prominent financier in a Chicago bank. He went underground as a fugitive until the statutes of limitations allowed him to re-emerge and became a legal activist, to the delight and consternation of not a few in Washington, DC.

One summer, my coz’ host mother stood by their doorway as it became obvious that her daughter and I took serious accounts of each other, and whispered: “look how dark he is!” My wife might have married me just for that domestic editorial!

My coz’ sister became my girl friend after she went to school in Greensboro, NC where the Civil Rights sit-ins started. On a February day 1968, I marched in Washington, D.C. to Arlington Cemetery as a young Seminary student of Perkins School of Theology, SMU in Dallas to protest LBJ’s Vietnam War that siphoned resources for the War on Poverty, close to the civil rights movement led by a Baptist cleric MLK Jr.

Early April, while I was in a car accident in Dallas, MLK Jr. came down with a bullet at dusk while standing outside a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. From the SMU Health Center bed where I was confined, I watched U.S. cities burn in the aftermath of the civil right leader’s assassination. Then I received a phone call from my sobbing girl friend in Greensboro as gunshots popped on the background and flames engulfed the city.

The event drew Mary Lou and I closer, and shortly on a December day of ‘68 in VA, we exchanged vows of connubial existence that gave us two daughters who now have two boys each that call me lao ye ye (grandpa). The sisters endured their Mom and Dad’s style of temporary dwellings in the North America of Canada and the U.S., the Marshall Islands and Guam of Micronesia, the Philippines, and Hawaii, occasionally looked after by colleagues while we romped promoting our brand of human development to villages around the world.

It was at our wedding that I learned of Loving vs. Virginia, a Supreme Court decision only a year before outlawing the State of VA’s prohibition on mixed marriages, aka, miscegenation (e.g., white marrying black). Proud to be born beautifully brown, I was considered “colored” like the descendants of black slaves of Africa in the deep South that rent the Union into a civil war a century earlier, and cost the life of Abe Lincoln.

MLK Jr. served as an icon for the civil rights movement. I also know of “unknowns” unheralded for the scars they suffered, snarled and bitten, clawed, and barked at by German shepherds unleashed by law enforcement officials on marchers during the heyday of protests in Mississippi and Alabama, like Selma.

I have a picture of Cinta Kaipat, Kenneth Govendo, John Hill, Ambrose Bennett, et al, in front of the AMP visitors’ center to commemorate MLK Jr.’s Day. I dubbed the Baptist Rev as Martin the King with no trace of disrespect but with clarity that the cleric only an inch taller than I pulled his pants in the morning one leg at a time, like everyone else, but managed to leave an indelible cause in the minds of his generation without the stern granite profile that now graces the Washington Mall by the tidal basin.

Civil rights ensure peoples’ physical and mental integrity, life and safety, protect them from discrimination on the grounds of race, gender, national origin, sexual orientation, color, ethnicity, religion, or disability; individually, it protects privacy and the freedoms of thought and conscience, speech and expression, religion and assembly, the press and movement. The parson from Georgia occupied a larger than life image on that score.

I was 23 when at 39, he caught his final gasp of air that emboldened and ignored Asian-American indignities I suffered in a racist society that glorifies the virtues of the Aryan race. Adolf Hitler whose swastika graces many a home deluded America’s for white only pretensions. Trump has become ISIS recruitment poster boy.

Bernie Sanders talks liberal, Hillary waits her turn at the WH after BHO crossed the color line and she, gender, but lilywhite patriarchy is America’s home paradigm. Trump embodies Jamestown, the Puritans and the Pilgrims that start NA history in textbooks though the Mongols crossed the Bering Straits long before a Norwegian navigator lent his name to the place, consigned to reservations, formally discriminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 repealed only in 1943.

Not on hero worship, but TY to Martin the King.