The Content of His Character
Today we're celebrating the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr. and his beautiful dream that we would view each other through the lenses of character, integrity, and kindness rather than color or ethnicity. It's an ideal my own father lived by. In March of 1955, my father was the 21-year-old son of an American living on the island of Trinidad in the West Indies. My grandfather, the black sheep of his family, had left the U.S. more than 30 years before that to seek his fortune, and wound up working on oil rigs off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia. My grandmother was Colombian, uneducated, cut off from her family by her unsatisfactory marriage to a wild non-Catholic. My father had a rather neglected childhood. His father was home less than half the time and apparently took little interest in my dad, his oldest surviving son (four other children had died before my dad was born). My father was not sent to school until the British colonial government passed a truancy la
