Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I grew up as a white girl during the Civil Rights Movement. Even within the confines of my very white Southern home, I never heard racial hate preached, or even condoned. My grandmother forbade use of the N-word within her home, and I grew up knowing that one had to be crude and ignorant to use that word. I knew it early as a hate word.

Nevertheless, no one in my family did anything to change a system that institutionalized racial discrimination, humiliation and outright cruelty against all persons with black skin. They all took part in the system just as it had been passed down to them by their parents. All the adults in our family, especially the older ones, still held terrific resentments over the horrors of the War Between the States and the period of Reconstruction, which was designed to punish, rather than to reconcile.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a hero of my own childhood. The first time I remember knowing about him was when I was 9 years old. It was 1960 and Dr. King had been arrested in Atlanta with a small number of other blacks, because they dared to walk in to be seated at the Magnolia Tea Room in Rich’s Department Store. He and the others were arrested.

I heard about it that same night at our dinner table, and for the first time in my memory, I heard my father rail against those “damned n*****s.”

I was only nine years old, but already I understood that this was hatred that had been there all along, and I just hadn’t seen it because the system of segregation had kept it hidden and beneath the surface. The moment I realized that, I felt as though the ground under my feet had shifted as in a major earthquake.

Suddenly, I began to see all of the white people I knew, myself included, in an entirely different light. The ethereal glow, that had been false, immediately wore off all that pleasant gentility and I never saw it the same way again.

Dr. Martin Luther King had demonstrated with his quiet good manners, his eloquent refusal to bend or to become violent, the utter sinfulness of our own white souls.

History books tell young people today that the civil rights movement was fought and won in the streets, sometimes involving violent reactions to peaceful protests. History books paint a picture of a valiant struggle for justice carried out by a unified black people against a unified white people.

Nothing could be further than the truth.

Dr. Martin Luther King was the sunlight that shone into the dark caverns of racist sin.

He and those who stood and marched and sat-in with him were the shining beacon pointing the way on a new and far better path.

The Civil Rights Movement was astonishingly successful because it was fought in every living room, every bedroom, every kitchen, every church meeting, every civic group meeting and every newsroom in America. With King’s public emergence, one could no longer sit idly on the fence and claim ignorance to this injustice.

White people argued from sunup to sundown in those days. Brother argued with sister, and sister with brother. Husbands argued with wives, and wives with husbands. Old friends, relatives, students, parents, grandparents, cousins and everything in between argued over the rights of black people.

Blacks argued it out too. Rosa Parks and King and others became united, yes, but it was a tug of war among all groups, a seemingly insurmountable challenge that offered no quick, nor easy solutions. Young blacks argued for more violence and more speed. Older blacks argued that things should be left alone; they might get worse in the end.

No one was spared the conflict. No one was allowed to duck the issue or hide behind the excuse, “But it’s always been this way.”

The one thing, in my opinion, that gave Dr. King his greatest strength was that he truly understood that under Jim Crow’s institutionalized racism, the ones in the most danger, the ones to whom the most ultimate harm was being done, were not the oppressed, but the oppressors.

How could he understand that?

He was a genuine Christian, who understood that earthly suffering was merely temporal. He knew that it was the white people, blinded by their own hate and sin who were dooming themselves to hell and that many among them would pay eternally for the sin of racism.

As soon as he made his first tentative steps in response to Rosa Parks’ heroism, Dr. King understood his mission to shine the light on lunch counters, on buses, in motels, in every public place, and let God take care of the rest.

The Civil Rights Movement, in less than one decade, brought down a system of institutionalized injustice that had been not only accepted, but nurtured and massaged (yes, often in churches) for more than a century after the Civil War. In less than one decade Dr. Martin Luther King won the hearts and minds of white people all over the land, and mercifully enabled their reconciliation with God and African-Americans.

Was everything perfect? No. It never will be perfect as long as human beings are human beings, every single one us, of all colors, prone to sin.

But in less than a single year, the sermons of Jeremiah Wright have done more to undo that reconciliation between the races than I could have possibly imagined.

Whites are now looking at black friends and co-workers and wondering if they agree with Rev. Wright, if they hate all white people as much as Wright does.

Blacks are now looking at their friends and co-workers wondering if the whites hold them accountable for the Reverend’s hate-filled rhetoric.

Where trust was growing between all Americans, suddenly hate has once again emerged, seemingly victorious.

And Barack Obama had one chance to heal this deep wound that his own minister of 20 years has caused. He simply could not bring himself to say that no matter what other redeeming qualities the man might have, no matter how much he may have personally suffered, that there is simply no excuse ever for this kind of lying hate.

Wright’s hatred is merely inciting lynch mobs of a different color.

Obama could not bring himself to unequivocally renounce this, and I am ashamed for him.

No matter how long the human race may exist on this earth, no two wrongs will ever make one right.

If Barack Obama does not even understand this much about basic human nature, he has a whole lot more to learn before he even thinks he can be President of the United States of America.

This judgment has nothing whatsoever to do with the color of his skin, and everything to do with the content of his character.

And that’s my opinion on the Obama race speech.