As MLK Foresaw, U.S. Racism's Been Largely Overcome

From the great Jeff Jacoby, at the Boston Globe:

.@Jeff_Jacoby: As MLK foresaw, racism in America has been largely overcome https://t.co/KJR7G4eO1S

— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) January 18, 2019

“I have no despair about the future,” wrote the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” “I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham. . . . We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

He was right.

It is a commonplace that racism is America’s original sin. Hardly a day goes by without attention being focused on instances of the racial injustice, friction, and double standards that can still be found in this nation. Open the morning paper or watch cable news, and there will be something to remind you of the country’s racial tensions — from controversy over flying the Confederate flag to NFL players protesting police brutality, from accusations of voter suppression in Georgia to an Iowa congressman defending “white nationalism.” It isn’t surprising that when Americans are asked in opinion polls whether race relations are getting better, many of them — sometimes most of them — gloomily reply that racism is still a major problem.

But it isn’t. It is only a minor problem now, one that has grown steadily less toxic and less entrenched. King predicted confidently that America would surmount its benighted racial past, and his confidence was not misplaced. Though his own life was cut short by a racist assassin, he foresaw that racism would lose its grip on American life.

“We’ve got some difficult days ahead, but . . . I’ve been to the mountaintop,” King said in his final speech. “I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land.” He knew that American racism would wither away. Fifty-one years later, it mostly has.

Consider some of the data on changing American values...

Keep reading.