“Biography is: a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.” Jose Ortega y Gasset

My cousin's precious daughter, borne from an interracial marriage.

On the first Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s holiday on January 20, 1986,  I sat inside my solitary room at William Beaumont Army Medical Center in El Paso, Texas. Controversy had swirled and MBank where I was a bank representative at the hospital had decided to remain open. It felt wrong and eerie. I'm glad that day and mentality are over.

As a young girl, I grew up in a time when the talk again whirled that interracial union would be bad for the children it would produce. I remember a black and white couple at my high school. They walked with their heads high and today I know what blind courage that took. I watched earlier in my education, a young girl chased home nearly every day by cruel children, taught to hate. And I guess that's why I've been led to work in social services nearly all of my adult career whether through a not for profit hospital, public broadcasting radio station, publications office, social service agency, YMCA, downtown Brooklyn junior college, tutoring in some of the poorest NYC neighborhoods, canvassing for Working Families Party, and teaching English to welfare to work recipients and immigrants.

In my own way, I am standing up for justice. Back in '86, I sat behind my teller's window, nervous and upset. Few people came to my window. It felt like the whole Nation was on holiday except for me. I sat there all day, feeling ashamed that we were open. It didn't happen again. And as the king we honor today, once said, I, too, " have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.