SOME OF THESE DAYS

A reflection for MLK Day

“All of God’s children gonna sit together, some of these days.”

-From the African-American Spiritual Welcome Table

The conviction in these words — the hope and faith in them — is why I’m even here at all. I was born because my parents believed them.

They met at a sit-in, my mom and dad. San Francisco, in the late 1960’s. He was a Black man from Harlem and she was a Jewish girl from Akron. They fell in love and got married and had three golden-brown babies, all in the hope and faith that their daughters, and all the children, of all shades of black, brown and beige, would sit together in freedom and fairness — some of these days.

After all, they were fighting to make it so. My parents and their friends had been working, marching, protesting, sitting in, standing up. And they were singing freedom songs, songs that went all the way back to our earliest days. These songs that originated in camp meetings and plantation fields, that had traveled the Underground Railroad, that had voiced the unimaginable cry for freedom — “Steal Away”, “Let My People Go”, “Welcome Table” — songs repurposed, in my parents’ day, to fight for a new kind of freedom.

“I’m gonna sit at the Woolworth counter, some of these days.”

“I’m gonna be a registered voter, some of these days.”

These songs got around in my parents’ day; on the Freedom Rides, across the bridge at Selma, along the March on Washington. Dr. King said, “We sing the freedom songs today for the same reason the slaves sang them, because we too are in bondage and the songs add hope to our determination that ‘We shall overcome, Black and white together, We shall overcome someday.’”

Those were some kind of days in America. There was a parting of the waters and a turning of the tide. There was violence and hatred and fear and division, and there was peace and love and courage and brotherhood. Everything changed. And not everything. Maybe you remember; maybe you were there. Or maybe for you, like me, those days belong to your mythology and legend, to your imagination and to the faded photographs of your parents when they were young. Maybe those days are the reason you’re even here at all, like me.

These days, we have plenty of fighting to do on so many fronts. We have to pick up where our parents left off; keep working and trying, keep our eyes on the prize of freedom and…

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