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A cross Mulberry, not far — maybe 40 or 50 yards at the most — once stood an empty warehouse. It was from that warehouse, one morning 40 years ago, that shots rang out striking Martin Luther King, Jr., as he exited his room to begin another day supporting Memphis garbage collectors’ drive for higher pay.

Standing in the parking lot of the old Lorraine Motel, one is immediately transformed in time, back to that fateful April 4 morning in 1968. The parking lot looks much the same today as it did then. The Lorraine went out of business in 1982 only to be resurrected by the people of Memphis as the National Civil Rights Museum.

A tour of the museum ends with steps out onto that balcony, to stand in the spot where our society’s most recent and greatest prophet was murdered. One’s knees buckle when confronted in such a personal way with how history changed — in one instant — on that spot.

Only one month before King was assassinated, a report had been issued by the Kerner Commission, a panel appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to find out why the cities of Newark and Detroit had been consumed a year previously by the fires of racial and economic inequality.

The commission’s report shocked white society at the time by clearly pronouncing the root cause of the urban violence of 1967 to be a systematic cultural and economic effort to create two societies: one for white people and a separate and unequal lower society for people of color.

The economic structures of the day, said the Kerner Commission report, kept people of color immersed in poverty and powerless by removing access to decent education, to decent jobs, to decent housing. An entire segment of the population, excluded from the full benefits of society, is bound to erupt in frustration and anger, said the report. Dr. King had been telling us that for over a decade, of course.

So, here we are 40 years later. If we are honest with ourselves, can we say much has changed?

If we look at our own community do we see racial, cultural and economic integration? Or do we see separate job opportunities, separate neighborhoods, separate schools? Do we see nearly half our school children so poor they qualify for reduced, or free, lunch costs (yes, a program of the federal government)? Do we see our schools graded as “failing” also located in our poorest neighborhoods? Do we see nearly two-thirds of our households earning less than $75,000 a year? In what neighborhoods are we apt to find those households?

One year to the day before that faithful event occurred on April 4, 1968, King delivered one of his most famous sermons in which he condemned our nation’s violence and aggression in a foreign land. He told the crowd gathered at Riverside Church in New York he could no longer remain silent about the war in Vietnam because, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.”

King was vilified for those remarks in the press and in white society. Have we changed at all since then? Do we still condemn voices raised on the black pulpit against the violence of the current war?

Cory Booker is currently the mayor of Newark., and recently told Bill Moyers on his PBS show, “Bill Moyers’ Journal,” race remains as separating an influence in society today as it did 40 years ago.

“And as soon as we start trying to forget race or turn our back on race, number one, we don’t confront the real racial realities that still persist. But, number two, is we miss the great delicious opportunities that exist in America and no where else,” Booker said. “You have to understand race now is ground into a complicated crucible with poverty and so many other issues — geographic dislocation — you name it. What we have to realize is we can get caught up as pundits sitting there talking about sound bites and race, which is not so helpful. Or we can say, ‘hey, black, white or whatever, let’s change policy to react to the concerns that we have.’ My passion, my life is not about trying to create justice for one group over another group. It’s to understand that we are one nation. We are in this together. We’re either gonna race together to the bottom or we’re gonna rise together to the top.”

We must ask ourselves, right here, right now, in our own community are we going to race to the bottom or are we going to rise together to the top? As Booker suggests, are we going to talk or are we willing to act on these great, delicious opportunities?