Archives Reprint

   Without recalling that the nation has a tarnished history of oppression, Americans cannot fairly decide where the country should go.

    As debates related to America's long history of racial oppression continue to arise - this week, over a Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in Roanoke and affirmative action in colleges and universities - allow us to restore something crucial:

    History.

    Separated from it by lengthening time, the nation's communal memory has faded of the Jim Crow laws, enforced poverty and racist violence that made King a martyr and affirmative action a moral necessity.

    And without that history we cannot adequately understand how and why we arrived at this place as a nation that seeks to redress past wrongs. We lose sight of the enormity of the oppressions, greater by far than any other Americans have faced other than American Indians.

    We lose, too, history's detail, context and nuance, and the insight they give us into America's decision to redress the injuries it inflicted for centuries. And why, with people of color still lagging far behind the rest of America in measures of wealth, health and education, it should continue to do so.

    We forget, as well, the extraordinary moral strength and humanity of King, who braved violence in the quest for freedom, yet rejected the use of violence himself - even as others proclaimed it a necessity.

    We forget why he deserved such honor then, and why we need to honor him now.

    Fading memories are inevitable. For the young, the nation's racist past is only a subject from history class. To others, even King's slaying in 1968 is a dry historical fact, like the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 - too distant to have significant relevance for them now.

    Some of us, of course, never acknowledged the injustices.

    But to rightfully address America's misdeeds, we must keep history with us. The sterile legal, political and economic theories that now dominate debate are inadequate.

    We must remember our long racial past of lynchings, disenfranchisement, inferior black schools, the murders of young black boys and girls. Civil rights workers who were brutally beaten and murdered. The color barrier in education, professions and accommodations that only slowly descended and whose effects linger.

    A city that understands the past would not hesitate to honor King. A nation that understands the past would not dismantle affirmative action before its time.

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