Published Jan. 14, 2007 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune

'Every mountainside' means ore dumps too

By Aaron J. Brown

Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Not one student, not one citizen can go long without hearing at least an excerpt from Dr. King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, nor should they.

Excerpts are good, but it’d be better if you saw the whole thing at least once in your life. In watching the whole speech you get a better idea of the context on that warm Washington, D.C., day in 1963 when King broadcast into the crowd of thousands and the television sets of millions, setting a moral standard for human decency that no one was able to argue against.

So now we have a holiday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, observed on Monday. Some of us have the day off. There won’t be any mail. The news will talk about it a little, replaying part of the speech no doubt. But beyond that, what does it really mean?

Dr. King’s speech happened long before I was born, in a place far from where I grew up on the Mesabi Iron Range. If you ask most Iron Rangers what they think about the King holiday, you’d get a wide range of answers. Some would be flowery, a few would be racist, most would be fairly ambivalent. I’ve had some years to think about it now, and in the shadow of our mighty ore dumps on the outskirts of our Iron Range towns, I am left thinking of this quote from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech:

“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

Dr. King is talking about the plight of African Americans in the 1960s, but he is also talking about the plight of all humankind when justice is ignored. His dream is not reserved for any one race. And while total world peace might always remain out of the reach of mortals, it is still the goal good people strive to achieve. No one is ever harmed by just a little bit more understanding or just a little bit more tolerance for those different from us.

I was not around when immigrants built the Iron Range, but I imagine that many of them probably dreamed of a day when their children were not judged for their ancestry, but for their accomplishments. A scan of Hibbing newspapers from the early 1900s shows that European immigrant groups were almost as divided as blacks and whites in the American South during segregation, with plenty of prejudice and violence to spare.

We Iron Rangers know that our immigrant forbearers also believed in a better future, because their biggest priorities were our public schools. Thanks to those schools, three generations have since received knowledge and power that was denied their ancestors in their homelands and again when those ancestors first arrived in the United States. Today, you still see some of the ethnic Iron Range names on the rosters of our local high school sports teams but, thanks to 50 years of birds and bees, most kids don’t belong to any one ethnic group. People are more apt to pay attention to the game than the surname nowadays. That’s something that northern Minnesotans, and all Americans, should think about when we consider the issues of race and culture in today’s world.

May that dream live and grow in all of us. We aren’t done yet and we shouldn’t stop trying.

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