The fight against racism persists

It’s worth remembering that Martin Luther King Day did not become a national holiday until 15 years after the civil rights icon’s death.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. The late Michigan Rep. John Conyers introduced a bill proposing the holiday just four days after King’s assassination, and kept introducing it, failure after failure.

The establishment of the holiday itself is a triumph. But the journey was long, difficult, and studded with setbacks. As was the case with the fight for civil rights that King helped lead. As is the case with the search for equality and fairness now.

Since last January alone, Long Island has been plagued by incident after incident of the kind of hate King decried in the deep South, in Chicago, and all over the country. Among them:

• Racist comments were posted on Zoom during a Southold Town board meeting, the first such gathering for the first Black person to hold public office in the town.
• An Aquebogue man was arrested in New York City and told police he operated a white supremacist group on Twitter and had Nazi paraphernalia in his house, which he termed “really cool.” He was charged in a multi-count indictment after making online threats against Jews.
• A Hauppauge man made anti-Arab comments against two people in a Lake Grove mall parking lot, and attempted to run over one of them, according to Suffolk police.
• A woman of South Asian descent was subjected to racial slurs by a passenger in a car that blocked the woman’s path near a Massapequa train station.
• Antisemitic statements were made during a Rockville Centre meeting about the appearance of a large menorah on a neighbor’s lawn.
• Racist and antisemitic graffiti was found on a building and a kiosk in Port Jefferson Station, a bathroom at Smithtown High School East, and at a Shirley elementary school, among others.
• Antisemitic flyers, including text about "Jew's plan for world domination,” were sprinkled in different communities, including ones home to many Jewish families.

These are just some incidents that made headlines. Discrimination toward gay and transgender individuals also persists. Hate and racism have not been buried all that deep on Long Island or anywhere in America. The reaction to a Ku Klux Klan image published last February as the “Photo of the Week” by the Suffolk County Historical Society Museum — which missed out on including important context — shows the rawness of these wounds.

This litany is all the more reason to embrace the example of King on this day: his persistent crusading against an indelible injustice, and his confidence that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” 

Even in our increasingly diverse and, at times, inclusive modernity, the fight against hate and discrimination is not a memory for the history books. It must be embraced and understood, here and now.