King's dream paved the way for Obama

How fitting it is that our great nation will witness the swearing-in ceremony of our 44th President, Barack Obama, on Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2009, one day after the nation celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday, Jan. 19.

Dr. King had a dream. It was the same dream evoked by the signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on Jan. 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia. King grew up in the deeply divided South where only lip service was given to racial equality.

Back when young Martin was growing up as the son of a Baptist minister, Americans with dark skin couldn't drink out of the same drinking fountains that lighter skinned folks used.

Americans with dark skin had to ride at the back of a bus or train car, give up their seats to the lighter-skinned people, could not sit at the same lunch counter, sleep in the same hotels, worship in the same churches or even sit on the same floor of a movie theater as lighter-skinned Americans.

King worked tirelessly for civil rights and racial equality. He led the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, serving as its first president.

In 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway for his work to end racial segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means.

For his beliefs, King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and a Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.

But it wasn't until 1983, some 207 years after the Declaration of Independence, that Dr. King's legacy and selfless leadership was fully recognized and given its due honor.

Then-President Ronald Reagan signed a law creating Martin Luther King Jr. Day in a White House Rose Garden ceremony on Nov. 2, 1983. It was observed for the first time on Jan. 20, 1986.

On Tuesday, Dr. King's dream will be fully realized in reality when the Hawaii-born 47-year-old Barack Obama, the son of a white woman, Ann Dunham, from Wichita, Kan., and Barack Obama, Sr., a Luo tribesman from Kenya, is sworn in as America's 44th President.

Obama is the first dark-skinned American to hold such high office.

The November election marked, perhaps for the final time in the United States, that a political candidate's race became an issue in a popular vote.

And a majority of Americans declared in voting for Obama that they, too, shared Dr. King's dream when he said, "I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Obama's character, which has been formed in part by education and travel overseas at a young age and later honed as a student at Columbia University and Harvard Law School and where he was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, will certainly be tested during his four-year term of office just as he was tested when elected in 2004 to serve as the junior United States Senator from Illinois.

But it will not be the shade of his skin, rather the keenness of his intellect, that will be the deciding factor in his success or failure - the same yardstick that all of us, male or female, should be measured with in this melting pot nation of ours.

The same nation to which we all pledge allegiance by saying, in part, "One nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."