It should be no surprise, then, that my parents allowed me to travel to New York at first to visit my relatives, and, later on, to go on my own.

Thus it was that at the age of 17, when I was a senior in high school, I went to New York for a few days vacation with a friend. We settled in at a hotel in downtown Manhattan, not far from Pennsylvania Station on 34th Street. It was modest, but clean and comfortable.

After we registered and freshened up a bit, we went out on the street. Coming out of the hotel, we were approached by a young man who happened to be African-American. He was well-dressed, clean shaven, looked both respectable and responsible, and apparently had his wife and several small children in tow. The young man told me that he, his wife and children had traveled all night on the train from South Carolina, and needed a place to stay and rest.

The young man asked me if there were any rooms available at the hotel I had just ‘exited from. I told him yes, of course." We had just obtained a room without any reservation or difficulty. I was sure there were plenty of rooms available. Just then the young man told me that the attendant at the registration desk had insisted that the hotel was filled.

In my youthful innocence and naivete, I assured the man that that could not be true. I went back into the hotel, headed for the registration desk and asked the attendant if there were still available rooms. He told me there were plenty.

I marched outside to tell the young man the good news. As I finished my story, I could read the distress in his eyes and in his facial expression. It suddenly dawned on me that it would be a waste of time for him to enter the hotel again. This was one of those cases where an invisible sign read "Blacks not wanted." I felt ashamed for my race and for my country. I felt helpless and miserable since I had no advice to give him and nowhere to send him. I slinked off like a wounded puppy. At least I would have a bed to sleep in that night and a bathroom as well. What he would do, I had no idea, and still don’t.

In that brief encounter, I came face to face with the evil of racism, an evil which was tolerated by so many good and respectable people in our country in those days. Yes, we heard about Jim Crow in the South, the occasional lynching of a black man, and stories about blacks having to go to segregated schools, or forced to sit in the back of the bus, or having to use special, and, for the most part, inferior accommodations such as rest rooms. But most of this occurred in the South, and most of us had never been there so we could easily ignore it as if it didn’t really exist.

Was it the same in the days of slavery? Was it another question of "out of sight, out of mind?" But what of the people who lived in the South? How did they justify their tolerance for evil in their midst?

Lest we be too judgmental, however, let us ask ourselves how we so easily tolerate the evil of abortion in our midst today. We seem to take rather easily the fact that more than 1 million unborn human entities are destroyed each and every year in this country. On the scale of importance, as measured by our political choices, it seems far down the list from our every day concerns. One day, people will wonder how we tolerated it.

It took the great civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to wake us up to the evils of racial segregation, discrimination and prejudice. The stimulus was both official and individual. It came from the Supreme Court in 1954, the Brown vs. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in the public schools. It also came from a feisty lady named Rosa Parks who refused to give up her seat in a bus to a white person and move to the back of the bus.

This set the stage for Martin Luther King Jr., a young and at that time unknown Baptist minister, who led a 382-day boycott of the Montgomery, Ala., bus system in 1955. The courts later ruled segregation in public transportation to be unconstitutional.

Over the next 13 years, Martin Luther King Jr. challenged segregation laws all over the south and racist attitudes and prejudice wherever they existed in our country. Through his non-violent protests and demonstrations he awakened the conscience of America which until then, had been in a deadly stupor. In the process he endured insult, ridicule, hatred, beatings and imprisonment.

In 1964 landmark civil rights legislation was passed under President Johnson. In 1965 Martin Luther King Jr. became the youngest man in history to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his heart, Martin Luther King Jr. knew he was a lightening rod for hate-filled assassins. He spoke of his dreams for justice and equality, but like Moses of old, he felt he would never enter the promised land himself. He was the prophet. He became the martyr. Others would reap the benefits. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at a motel in Memphis, Term., on April 4,1968.