At Your Service by Maggie Inge

When one is a perfectionist, good enough is never good enough; there is the constant striving for something never achieved. I know from my own experience. Take this column, for example. Each week I go through life, in the back of my mind tossing about ideas and subjects. As one rises to the top, I mull it over and phrases begin to take shape.

I do not know what it is like to be white; any more than I can know what it is like to be a man. I was born into this life a black female and these factors, combined with the occurrence of that birth in the post World War II era, account for much of who I am. From this perspective, I offer a retrospective on the 40 years since an assassin’s bullet took the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.