"Why America May Go to Hell"

On Thursday, April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. retreated to room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, worrying about a sanitation strike in Memphis and working on his sermon for Sunday. Its title: “Why America May Go to Hell.” For King, whose focus had shifted from civil rights to antiwar agitation and populist economics, the Dream was turning dark. He never preached the sermon.

America may go to hell because it will never solve its race problem. The key issue as I see is that most whites are racist and don’t even know it. Case in point:

I just had the most amazing experience. A white female co-worker of mine just walked into my office. She and I are cool friends, but she is around 50 years old, and I am 30.

So she walks in and starts talking about her husband. She says that before he married her, he had been married to another woman, and they had had 3 kids together. He abandoned those children and the wife for my co-worker.

So she says that her parents were very concerned about her marrying him at the time (about 10 years ago). Then she says, to my face, “I told my parents he was a nice guy, and at least he’s not BLACK!!”