Goldsmith is a former law partner, adjunct law professor, Superior Court judge, San Diego city attorney, California state legislator and mayor of Poway. He lives in San Diego.
While waiting to be seated at a restaurant, a Black man struck up an interesting conversation with a White man. They planned to sit together and continue their conversation. However, the manager separated them, bringing the Black man to an isolated compartment in the back.
When questioned, the manager said, “Everything is equal. Back here you will get the same food. You will be served out of the same dishes and everything else. You will get the same service as everybody out there.” The year was 1956, and the man was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
King was angry and bitter. He felt isolated and unfairly cut off from further discussion with the young man. It was not about getting the same food and service. It was deeper than that, something King later described when speaking about school desegregation and the evils of segregation.
“If it had been possible to give Negro children the same number of schools proportionately and the same type of buildings as White children, Negro children would have still confronted inequality in the sense that they would not have had the opportunity of communicating with all children,” King said in 1956 in a speech titled “Desegregation and the Future.”
“You see, equality is not only a matter of mathematics and geometry, but it’s a matter of psychology. It’s not only a quantitative something, but it is a qualitative something,” King said.
“Segregation is evil because it scars the soul of both the segregated and the segregator,” he added. “It distorts the personality of the segregated as well as the segregator. It relegates the segregated to the status of a thing, rather than a person.”
Although America is no longer subject to Jim Crow laws, forms of segregation remain. Residential segregation is widespread in our communities, according to a 2021 report prepared by UC Berkeley.
“Areas may appear to be integrated because they are home to many different racial groups when in fact those groups live completely apart,” the report explained. “The city of Detroit is 80 percent Black, for instance, while Grosse Pointe, a suburb that shares a border with the city, is 90 percent white.”
The report concludes that segregation is growing, with 81 percent of large metropolitan areas more segregated in 2019 than in 1990.
Whether by design or not, government programs have sometimes increased segregation.
As a child, I saw that happen.
Growing up in an integrated blue-collar New York neighborhood in the 1950s, most of my Black playmates were over time moved to largely segregated government “projects.”
Regardless of the causes, the anger and bitterness felt by those segregated today are similar to what King experienced in 1956.
Today’s segregation is harmful and must be addressed. In addition to physical separation, our culture appears determined to divide us psychologically, often characterizing us as “things” (colors) rather than as individuals. We seem to have lost our way toward a color-blind society advocated by King where people are judged by individual character.
As we celebrate King’s teachings, we should follow them.
We must stop dividing people.
We need to desegregate America.
