In the year prior to his assassination, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King isolated himself in a house in Jamaica where he wrote what was to become his final book. King said he felt at home there: “In Jamaica, I feel like a human being.” “One day, here in America,” said King, “I hope that we will see this, and we will become one big family of Americans.”
50 years later, it is an aching American tragedy that we find ourselves with issues of race, arguably, as emotional, divisive and consequential as in King’s time. The culmination of King’s thinking in Jamaica ultimately became the book “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” In it he offers this stark warning: “Together we must learn to live together as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.” Our failure to “live together as brothers” has gone to seed in what increasingly feels like the chaos King foreshadowed.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Credit:Nate Smallwood for ProPublica
McCanlies in her home office in Morgantown, West Virginia Credit:Nate Smallwood for ProPublica
