On April 4, 1968, I was 11 and growing up in Memphis when the news came that Martin Luther King had been murdered. My parents couldn’t hide how bad it was – they were angry. They were afraid. And most memorably to my childhood self, they were crying. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but I know now that I was afraid that killing the dreamer could kill the dream.

Exactly one year earlier, in a speech at Riverside Church in New York City, Dr. King said, “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now… Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity.” A year later, his call for civil rights and racial justice was answered by an assassin’s bullet.

King understood the urgency of now.

He graduated from divinity school in 1955 and six months later he was leading the Montgomery Improvement Association during the now-famous Montgomery bus boycott. For the next 12 years he was a tireless public spokesperson for racial justice. He endured being shot at, stabbed, beaten, surveilled and harassed by the government, arrested more than 30 times, subjected to unrelenting media scrutiny, outpourings of hate speech, and death threats.

The urgency of now made King leery of anyone, “who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’” He was a disrupter of the status quo who would have rejoiced at athletes protesting police brutality and racial injustice during the singing of the national anthem. The night before he was killed, he said that students who were “sitting down” at lunch counters were really “standing up” as Americans. It’s safe to say King would have supported the athletes kneeling as much as he supported the students sitting.

King paid a huge price for his activism during the 39 years he was alive, and then he paid for it with his life. Fifty years later, my childhood fears remain, and I find myself asking: did the dream live on or did it die with the dreamer?

In 1969, the Chicago Police Department killed Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader, and Mark Clark, an activist, during a predawn raid. No one was prosecuted. Just this past week we found out that the Baton Rouge police officer who killed Alton Sterling, an unarmed Black man, will be fired but not charged with a crime. This decision feels like a punch in the kidneys, and yet it’s not a shock. It continues a pattern of unnecessary law enforcement violence. Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner. These are recent examples, but violence against communities of color stretches back to segregation, to Jim Crow, to slavery.

Racial disparities in policing, and police violence, reflect our past — and without reform will determine our future. The Kerner Report (Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders) was released Feb. 29, 1968. The basic conclusion was that “our nation is moving towards two societies, one Black one white, separate and unequal… What white Americans have never fully understood – but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it and white society condones it.”

Last month, the Economic Policy Institute released a report that found no progress since 1968 in how Blacks fare in comparison with whites when it comes to homeownership, unemployment and incarceration. They also found the wealth gap between whites and Blacks tripled between 1968 and today. Individual Black people have surely been successful in modern day America, but what does that mean if the Black community as a whole has not moved in half a century? Where is the “change” in incremental change? What good is the King monument in Washington, D.C., and the federal holiday in his name if we can’t advance the dream?

King spoke of the unfulfilled promise of General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 — the one that promised Black people 40 acres and a mule — saying, “At the very same time America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and the mid-west – which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.” King knew there has always been affirmative action in this country. It was just allotted to white people, not Black people.

So, can you kill the dream by killing the dreamer? The clear answer is: “It is not yet decided.”

I look back at the last 50 years and remember what King said at Riverside Church in 1967 about procrastination being the thief of time. I don’t want to be the person he described – standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. Our lack of progress on the road to racial justice must serve as a call to action. The last several years has seen movement in the way Americans of all ages are thinking about racial, social, economic and criminal justice. A new generation of voters is on the way.

As we consider our path forward on the road to racial justice, remember one last warning from King: “We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today… In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late.” The dream is not dead – not yet. Let’s act to make sure we will not be too late.

Ria Tabacco Mar, Staff Attorney, ACLU's Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & HIV Project & Galen Sherwin, ACLU Women's Rights Project & Erin Harrist, Senior Staff Attorney, New York Civil Liberties Union

When it was reported last week that the New York City Commission on Human Rights was investigating The Wing, the co-working space for women, over its women-only membership policy, its members and advocates rushed to the company’s defense. The inquiry has generated controversy given the heightened awareness, resulting from the #MeToo movement, that sexual harassment is still rampant in far too many workplaces.

Judging by The Wing’s success as both a business venture and a place for women to gather, it has undoubtedly met a real need. Yet the commission’s job is to respond to reports of discrimination it receives, as in this case. By limiting its patrons to women only, The Wing may not be in compliance with New York’s public accommodation law — a law that exists for good reason and furthers gender equality.

New York, like nearly every state and many cities, provides that places of public accommodation can’t discriminate against members of the public based on characteristics including race, religion, disability — or sex. Antidiscrimination laws like New York’s are why we have the freedom to go about our daily lives without fear of being turned away from retail stores, banks, and hotels simply because of who we are.

Even those who agree with these principles have been tripped up by two things in the case of The Wing. It’s not a shop or a restaurant; it bills itself as a private club. Clubs that are distinctly private aren’t ordinarily subject to public accommodation laws, and in fact they can’t be. If New York tried to apply its law to a genuinely selective group — by requiring a book club formed by female college roommates to admit men, for example — that would raise serious freedom of association concerns.

But simply calling a club private doesn’t make it so. The Wing is reported to have more than 2,000 members, raising questions about whether it is truly the kind of selective group that warrants special protection. (State and local law set the threshold at 100 and 400 members, respectively.) And it offers merchandise for sale on its website, along with other hallmarks of a public-facing business. Businesses that choose to serve the public in this way subject themselves to a variety of state regulations, including antidiscrimination laws.

The second, more difficult issue is that The Wing serves women — the very group sex discrimination laws were designed to protect. Its mission is to build networks and advance women’s access to power in fields from which they have traditionally been excluded. This mission, and the creation of women-only spaces, may seem particularly compelling against the #MeToo backdrop. And, unlike some single-sex spaces, The Wing deserves credit for its inclusive policy that permits anyone who identifies as a woman, including women who are transgender, to join. Indeed, it has prominently featured women who are transgender in its publications and marketing materials. And it has put women of color front and center in its programming.

But the creation of women-only spaces can have unintended consequences, and it raises questions about who is left out. The requirement that members be “living as a woman,” for example, may exclude people who are gender nonconforming or who do not identify on the gender binary, further compounding their exclusion from public spaces. Indeed, The Wing’s own comments about how it might verify an applicant’s gender — by reviewing social media feeds to determine whether she is “living as a woman” — are troubling. How does someone’s social media profile reflect whether they are sufficiently “female”? What criteria are used to assess that?

None of this is to say that single-sex spaces are never warranted, only that the default rule against them is rooted in historical need. And it is not absolute: New York City law allows the Commission on Human Rights to grant an exemption from the default rule for places of public accommodation if there are legitimate “public policy” reasons to do so. Although The Wing has apparently not yet applied for such an exemption, it’s possible that at least some of its activities might qualify. Certainly, the goal of remedying past and continuing sex discrimination at work is a compelling public interest —of which the #MeToo movement is a powerful daily reminder. 

While it’s understandable that the investigation prompted an outcry,  it’s now up to The Wing and the commission to assess whether there is a solution that will satisfy legal requirements without compromising The Wing’s important mission.

On March 27, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos appeared before the House Appropriations Committee to answer questions about the administration’s first year in office. While I had no shortage of questions for her, one of my top priorities was asking her about her department’s failure to protect the rights of transgender students.

During the Obama administration, the Department of Education issued guidance to public schools explaining that schools should allow students to use restrooms consistent with their gender identity in accordance with basic civil rights law under Title IX.

I heard from plenty of teachers and administrators throughout Wisconsin who were either already acting in accordance with the new rule, or gladly welcomed guidance on this important issue.

However, Secretary DeVos rescinded the Obama-era guidance in 2017, robbing transgender students of rights which should be afforded to every public school student.

In February of this year, Secretary DeVos continued to discriminate against transgender students by announcing that her department would not investigate any complaints filed by transgender students who had been banned from restrooms that match their gender identity.

When this happened, I couldn’t help but think of Ashton Whitaker, a young man from my home town of Kenosha, Wisconsin, who is currently a first year student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2016, Ashton rightly challenged his school to allow him to use the restroom consistent with his gender identity. Courts affirmed that forcing this young man to use the wrong restroom constituted illegal discrimination on the basis of sex.

In 2018, we should not need a refresher on basic discrimination. Rescinding someone’s rights, which have been upheld in court, on the basis of their gender identity is wrong. Refusing to listen to complaints from a certain population of students is wrong.

Secretary DeVos has consistently shown her willful ignorance when failing to visit underperforming schools, as well as her mean-spirited, anti-LGBT views when denying rights to certain students. At some point, she should realize that as Secretary of Education, she is supposed to represent all students, not just a select few.