Our Five Big Tiny Words

As schoolchildren learn, the words “all men are created equal” have bound our nation for nearly 250 years.

Children also should learn how the Declaration of Independence’s invocation to equality represents a never fully achieved ideal.

So, as a reminder on this day honoring Martin Luther King Jr., we offer these words from the past.

We need them. Backsliding is ascendant. History has been supplanted by mythmaking. And the powerful have shown they believe equality is a privilege reserved for people who look and worship like them.

“If there is no struggle there is no progress,” the abolitionist and author Frederick Douglass said in 1857. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

“Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race … deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?” the U.S. Supreme Court said in a unanimous 1954 decision ending legal school segregation. “We believe that it does.”

And from King himself, from his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”