Myrlie Evers-Williams, in her moving autobiography, writes these words:How important it is for all of us, especially our young, to have a sense of history. Our goal should be not to live in the past, but to use the past - - the struggles, the strengths, even the mistakes. Just as Jewish people must never forget the Holocaust, we too, need to remember. If we don’t cherish our history, we will not have earned our place in the future.

Today is a day of remembering but more importantly it is a day of reconciliation and celebration, of celebrating our release from a system of racial segregation that for so long held us all in bondage – black and white alike. That has been a long, tortuous road that we have walked – a road that runs through this city and brought so much grief and tragedy to so many. One of the most tragic of the events along that road occurred exactly forty-five years ago this week not far from where we are gathered tonight. On the night of June 12, 1963 Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the Mississippi NAACP, was murdered by a white Mississippian in the carport of his home in West Jackson in front of his wife and their young children. I recall that day as if it was yesterday. That was one of the darkest times that I can ever remember. We now speak of terror as if it has only recently come to our country. Well, let me tell you something. As Dr. Jim Silver, my former history teacher at Ole Miss and the author of The Closed Society, pointed out, every black person in Mississippi and many white people lived under the constant shadow of terror during those days.

I have talked to Mrs. Evers many times about those events and how she was able to survive those horrors without letting hatred and bitterness overwhelm her. She had a right to be the bitterest person in America. It would have been understandable if she had come to hate all white folks. But out of her unspeakable anguish and her great Christian faith she came to understand that bitterness never lifted up a child or built a school or righted a wrong. She never gave up on Jackson and Mississippi and the people who lived here. And that is the lesson of reconciliation that all of us must learn.

Twenty years after Medgar Evers’ murder my wife, Elise, and I hosted a dinner in his memory at the Governor’s Mansion. Myrlie and her children were the guests of honor.  I said to her there at the dining room table that day, “Mrs. Evers, we white people owe your  martyred husband as much as black people do, for he helped free all of us from a system that enslaved us all.”

We have since honored Medgar Evers by naming streets and buildings and an airport in his memory. All of those things are appropriate, and I applaud them. But these are only symbols, tokens really, of what he stood for.  If Medgar Evers could speak to us this evening, I think he would be less interested in those physical structures than in what is happening to us as a people. As far as we have come from those old dark days in which he lived, I believe that he would be concerned about how much more we have to do to build the truly just and equitable society that he gave his life to help achieve. In spite of all of the progress that we have made, (and the race for President this year speaks dramatically to that progress), the issue of race remains the most difficult and intractable problem that our nation faces.

Why is this so? It is because we still have not come to terms with the deep-seated, little understood and usually repressed feelings that are derived from our different backgrounds. The old stereotypes die hard. Let’s face this fact: All of us are the products of our life experiences and the times and conditions in which we were raised. For many those life experiences have included discrimination and exclusion and bad memories. For others those experiences have been where privilege and acceptance have been taken for granted. I have a lot of well-meaning friends who cannot be characterized as racist who simply feel that it is unnecessary or even counterproductive to try to do anything to resolve these differences. They argue that it is just a waste of time because there isn’t much we can do and it is just better to let things alone. The only problem with that is that it doesn’t work that way. Our society is rapidly becoming more diverse – more complicated racially – more subject to misunderstanding and mistrust-more caught up in white flight and resegregation.

Unless we come together to work at eliminating or at least reducing the remaining areas of racial tension and misunderstanding, this state and this country are not going to be as good for our children and grandchildren to live in as they ought to be. Given the fabulous natural wealth and advanced social and educational institutions that we have, that would be a tragedy indeed if we let divisions over race diminish the quality of our lives as it has too often in the past. I believe that our ability to exist as a responsible and unified society in the future will depend on how well we eliminate a stratification of our citizenry based on race. A beginning point in this process may be a simple recognition that we do not and probably cannot see a great many issues from the same perspective. How far we think we have come in race relations depends largely on where we stand.

Most white people think we have come farther than most black people think we have. But what we can agree on is the proposition that we must provide an opportunity to every person regardless of race or class to secure a competitive education and to be able to compete on a level playing field and that racism in whatever form it is manifest, whether by speech or act, must be considered outside the bounds of acceptable conduct in our society. But having said that, let me also say that the cause of improved race relations is not served by having the issue of race used as a crutch or an excuse. Invoking the cry of race prejudice as a cover-up is just as wrong as race prejudice itself. All of this is a matter of trying to be honest with ourselves and each other. It is a matter of developing a sense of trust based on everybody–black and white-trying to start from the same place. That is admittedly harder for blacks to do than for whites. For blacks have more to forgive even if they cannot and probably should not forget. But there must come a time in the lives of all of us when we must recognize that we are all in this together – when we must move past the old divisions of race and recognize our common interests and our common humanity.

 But unfortunately that is not going to automatically happen. It will happen only as enough of us, black and white, work to make it happen. That includes working together to rebuild a family structure where more children can grow up with parental role models that can lead them out of poverty rather than perpetuating so many of them in it.

The liberation of all of us from our old biases and prejudices will finally enable us to ensure that our children and grandchildren will inherit a better place to live than has existed before. That is the kind of responsible citizenship that we must embrace – in doing the things that may not immediately and directly benefit us but will create for those who come after us the opportunity for a more fulfilling and productive life. That is a legacy that we should be proud to leave. That is the legacy that Medgar Evers would want us to leave.