I took my family to see the movie Selma and I left angry. I was born in 1969, almost one year and eight months after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I was raised hearing about the iconic Dr. King during Negro History Week (we didn’t get a month until 1976). I toured churches in the historic Fifth Ward District of Houston, Texas as young boy reciting Dr. King’s famous I Have a Dream speech. His picture sits on my desk, a picture I received over 27 years ago from my high school friends who said I bear some physical resemblance to this great leader of the civil rights movement. It was with great anticipation that I went to see Selma with my two children, who are even further removed from the civil rights movement than I am, but I left angry.
I was angry at myself. Have a done enough to keep the dream of Dr. King alive? Have I become too comfortable as a middle class professional that I am no longer willing to fight against injustice? I am living the American dream. I have a wife; two beautiful kids (a boy and a girl); a nice house and a good job. I have everything that Florida and James Evans could want. I have become Blackish, and that makes me angry as I think about the history of struggle and sacrifice that allows me to do the things I do today as an educated black man. Why do I deserve any of this?
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