Opinion: MLK Day reminds us to press ahead

In a recent meeting about upcoming stories, the Pasatiempo editorial staff discussed ways to put Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the spotlight. Only a handful of New Mexico communities hold events tied to the holiday.

Perhaps that’s not a surprise in a state whose population was 2.7% Black in 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. One could argue that the late civil rights leader should be celebrated regardless, but I’ve lived in enough states to understand that locally cherished celebrations often reflect the demographics.

I’m sharing some personal thoughts about modern civil rights struggles in the U.S. and honoring King with full understanding that I will never endure mistreatment in this country based on race. That’s privilege, and I own it.

I moved to Tampa, Fla., at age 20 to finish school and begin a job as a clerk at a large newspaper. I’d heard plenty of racial epithets growing up in rural Ohio. The ignorance in that and other areas was one of the primary reasons I moved away.

One of Tampa’s main arterials was Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. It had been renamed several years earlier, in 1989, yet many businesses on the road still sported “Buffalo Avenue” addresses on their storefronts.

My employer published a story about this, interviewing proprietors about why they’d resisted the change. Some said it was too costly to change signage; others, troublingly, suggested their property values would drop if they embraced the MLK name.

Most disturbingly, one interviewee said he didn’t think King had done enough to merit having a road named after him. That cannot be defended as anything but racist.

About two decades later, I was living in Las Vegas, Nev. My girlfriend, who was Black, had just moved there from the Tampa area, where she worked as a newspaper reporter. Her job had required her to knock on strangers’ doors to conduct interviews, and she often feared people would make incorrect assumptions about her intentions and possibly shoot her. A job that I’ve done, on and off, for 30 years without worry caused her to fear for her life.

I could list many ways in which I was stunned at how racism affected her. Spending a few years with her shone a spotlight on hundreds of specific privileges I’d previously been too ignorant to know I was taking for granted.

I’m not trying to praise myself as a paragon of racial sensitivity and wisdom. But I’m dismayed when people make presumptions or, worse, pronouncements about the realities faced by members of different ethnic groups.

Now that I’m more sensitive to it, I notice it often, in politics but also in daily life. So when Martin Luther King Jr. Day arrives on Monday, I’ll feel a mix of pride in the man’s accomplishments and shaping of modern society and somber awareness of how far we still have to go.

— Brian Sandford

The Santa Fe New Mexican