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Tony Brown, center, with UNMC Chancellor Harold M. Maurer, M.D., and Rubens Pamies, M.D., vice chancellor for academic affairs at UNMC. |
Regardless of skin color, there is only one race: the human race, Tony Brown told the audience commemorating the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday Monday in the lower Storz Pavilion.
“If I believe I belong to one race and you belong to another, there’s no way in the world I’m going to see you the way I see people who belong to my race,” Brown said. “The only way I’m going to get rid of racism is to stop practicing racial-ism — racial-ism fuels racism.”
It is a message he first learned from his “mama,” a dishwasher and maid, and later from Dr. King. Brown helped coordinate Dr. King’s historic march in Detroit, Mich., on June 23, 1963. An estimated 500,000 people attended the largest civil rights march in U.S. history, in which Dr. King made his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. It was 66 days before his historic presentation Aug. 28 at the March on Washington where the speech was recorded for posterity.
“The day I heard Dr. King’s speech was the day I knew what he was saying was right,” Brown said. “I knew it was right because what he said was what my mama had already taught me. The truth is self-evident.”
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UNMC’s Aura Whitney-Jackson with Tony Brown. On Monday, the City of Omaha honored Whitney-Jackson for promoting the ideals of Dr. King. She was one of several to receive the “Living the Dream Award.” |
Every human has 40,000 genes, Brown said. “Of those, only six give you skin color,” he said. “The same person can be black in America, white in Brazil and colored in south Africa.”
“This country can never be made whole unless it comes together and recognizes its humanity,” Brown said. “There’s no need for us to have a constant war between people because of the differences in their physical features. It’s just not logical.”
Appearance is the result of simple physical adaptation, Brown said, noting how our ancestors spent time in certain geographic areas, where they adapted to different environments. In the northern part of Europe, ultraviolet rays are very weak and the skin does not produce as much melanin so the skin is white. In the Sudan, the skin is dark to protect it from the ultraviolet rays.
Brown is the founder and commentator of the PBS series Tony Brown’s Journal, the longest running of all PBS series and author of “What Mama Taught Me: The Seven Core Values of Life.”
The human race, Brown said, consists of individuals with different ethnicities, cultures and ancestry, who have similar desires.
“You don’t need to be a different race to be proud of who you are,” Brown said. “You only need to know who you are to be proud of who you are. The only thing you can attract to yourself is what you have become.”
Brown also spoke about life as a series of choices and knowing the difference between right and wrong. “Whenever you do anything and only you benefit, it’s wrong. But whenever you do something, whenever you commit an act, and you and everybody else benefits, the family, the community and the nation benefits, then that’s right.”
One’s life will be happy, Brown said, if you love, practice charity and seek justice for yourself.
“Dr. King was telling us exactly how to be better people,” Brown said, through his ideas that we should love another and “sit together at the table of brotherhood.”
“Even today it sounds weird in America,” he said. “Even today we haven’t gotten there. We still hold on to this division, this need to believe that if my group gets something, your group must lose something. As long as we believe that way we are not going to be a nation.”