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Have to concoct an answer for a five-year old son and who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean? . . . . . When you are humilated day in and day out by nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored'; when your first name becomes 'boy' (However old you are) and your last name becomes 'John' and your wife and mother are never given the repected title 'Mrs." [sic]; hwen [sic] you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly on tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness' — the [sic] you will understand. . . ."*

Understanding — ourselves, our common past and common future — is what this occasion is about.

Thirty years ago in Alabama, a middle-aged department store seamstress refused to give up her seat on a bus so a white man could sit down.

Twenty-five years ago in North Carolina, four black young men refused to give up seats at a dime store lunch counter reserved for whites.

These small acts of passive resistance to American apartheid began the modern day civil rights movement, ushering in a period of mass protest and relative progress that was built, in turn, on other actions by other actors in the darker, more dangerous years that had gone before.

*Why We Can't Wait, Martin Luther King Jr., New York, Harper & Row, 1964.