In 1956, when I lived on Chicago’s North Shore (and the only place whiter was Vermont), my mother took my sister and me downtown to see the Christmas tree at Marshall Fields Department Store.  On our inevitable visit to the public bathroom, I encountered the very first person of color I had ever seen.  She was about my mother’s age and similarly dressed, but the unexpectedly deep hue of her skin had me fascinated.  My mother, who was a little more sophisticated than I, hastily distracted my attention and sent me into a cubicle to attend to business. I remember the stranger smiling briefly at me and then my mother.  She seemed unperturbed by my rude display of curiosity.  The anger and incivility that was to erupt throughout much of the country, just a couple of years later, was still in the unimagined future.

It wasn’t until I was in high school that I actually had schoolmates of ethnic diversity.  We were swept up into folk music, Viet Nam, the Civil Rights Movement and Dr. Martin Luther King. I assumed, from all I knew in the shelter of my teen years, that life moved on a continuous trajectory of improvement.  Peace would be restored, equal regard for all men and women would become the norm, and justice and enlightenment would soon prevail everywhere.  I, of course, would achieve some unspecified personal triumph, dazzling all doubters, particularly my long-suffering parents.

Here we are, more than forty years later, and I can’t help but wonder what’s been accomplished since.  True: the North Shore of Richard J. Daley’s buttoned-up Chicago has been transformed into a rainbow of diversity, pulsing with color and music from a thousand other worlds.  Some of that color has even crept into the alabaster halls of the new “super-rich.” But, for the most part, the mission of peace, hope and charity that we inherited from the troubled 60’s was rather too quickly abandoned in easier times;  and now we find ourselves mired in  violence, injustice and poverty on a scale never anticipated forty years ago.  Income inequity in America has reached epic proportions and African Americans still predominate on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.

Statistics predict that the white majority soon will be surpassed in number by the tide of diversity; but rather than embracing this refreshment of the gene pool,  the ignorant choose to hunker down in hostile bands of special interests, hurling insults, lies and paranoia over their crumbling walls of resistance while the real power, the money,  is further consolidated in the hands of less than 1% of the population, most of whom still are white and male. Once again, we face an uncertain future in which the poor and middle class do not seem likely to get an even break and violence is our biggest export.

Were he alive today, even Dr. King might find the prospects discouraging.