The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is a day that all Americans should wholeheartedly embrace. It should be viewed as an American holiday, much like the Fourth of July.

		Larry Davis (ledavis@pitt.edu) is dean and the Donald M. Henderson professor in the University of Pittsburgh's School of Social Work and director of Pitt's Center on Race and Social Problems.

It symbolizes the struggle of our country to liberate itself. In this instance, however, it was not a foreign power whose yoke we threw off, but our own yoke of past injustice and bigotry. Among other things, before the movement led by Dr. King, Americans were locked into a legacy of rigid racial scripts to which both blacks and whites were forced to adhere.

Last summer I took a trip with my family to visit my 95-year-old aunt, who lives in a little town deep in the heart of Alabama. My folks had left this town in the late 1930s as part of Black America's great migration out of the South. Like other members of their generation, they had moved north to escape the racial segregation and regional terror that characterized the period. As a young boy from northern Michigan, I remember visiting this town in the summers and always finding the interactions of black and white people there a little peculiar.

I thought it odd, for example, that my relatives and other "colored" people stood aside on the sidewalks downtown as the white people walked by. I remember there being no eye contact or social greeting between those walking by and those (I later learned) required to stand aside. I remember going to the movies and my cousin and I having to sit in the balcony (the crow's nest), which was fine with me, as I thought that was the coolest place to sit anyway. But most of all, I remember how strained relations were with the white people we encountered.

On my most recent visit to Alabama, my family and I stayed in a newly built hotel. One morning my wife and I found ourselves riding the elevator with a white couple who appeared to be in their mid-70s. While in the elevator, I remember thinking that my parents, who had literally left this town during the cover of night, would not have been allowed at that time to stay as guests in this hotel, nor would they have been allowed to share this small elevator with an elderly white couple.

The husband and wife, as it turned out, were natives of the area. During our ride in the elevator, they engaged my wife and me in conversation about where we were from. I was impressed with their friendliness and warmth.

Still, during the whole time, I kept thinking that they were old enough to have a keen recollection of segregation and the way things used to be. They, for sure, could remember a time when whites and blacks could not have shared this cordial experience.

When we reached the ground floor, I dared share my thoughts with them. I told them how good it was to speak with them and how we would not have been "free enough" to have had such an unguarded dialogue when my dad and mom left some 70 years ago. I went on to suggest that changes brought about by the civil rights movement had served to free everyone to be more human, if not at least more civil.

To my relief, they responded favorably to my violation of social etiquette in talking about "race and the old days." They stated that they did feel liberated by the changes that had taken place in the South and that they, too, felt greater freedom to be the outgoing social people they were. We agreed that in the past we both would have been locked into roles that would have prevented us from having anything other than the most perfunctory of social exchanges, if that.

On this 21st anniversary of Dr. King's birthday as a national holiday, many still talk and, I believe, think of the civil rights movement as a movement that benefits only black Americans. Rarely do I hear discussion about how Dr. King's movement served to free whites as well from what was for many a racially imposed social straitjacket.

It is true, as some will argue, that our country went kicking and screaming toward a freer and more just society -- but it went. We are a better nation because of the movement that Dr. King led. Few of us today would want to live in the America that existed prior to that movement, and all of us, black or white, have benefited from it.

Hence, each of us, irrespective of our personal demographics, may on this day want to spend some time thinking about how Martin Luther King's effort freed us to be more of who and what we want to be.