So I normally stick to sports on here, but on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have A Dream” speech, I want to share something personal that I recently came across in my family’s history that both disturbed and moved me just this week...

I visited an old family cemetery out in the middle of nowhere this week with my grandpa’s brother.

While it was cool to learn some of my family history, it was also incredibly disheartening to see the slave graves there, marked only with ugly rough sandstones of varying sizes...

Each rough unmarked sandstone represented a human life, that even in death was disrespected by my family—not deemed important enough to give a name.

Just yards away from the disheveled slave graves were large impressive headstones of my family members—some dating back to 1842...

The contrast in the care taken for the graves of my white ancestors versus that of the graves of their black “property” was truly sickening.

And after doing some math, I realized that one of the slave owners buried there actually lived well into the 1930s...

The same hands of that man that mistreated (to say the least) his black slaves, and buried them without even marking a name on their grave...those were the same hands that held my grandpa and his brother when they were little children less than 90 years ago...

This experience reminded me once again that slavery and the systemic nature of racism in this country is not something long, long ago, that we’ve moved past.

The scars of that recent past can still be seen at my old family cemetery, and new wounds are opened every day, still.

While I know that an apology from me is 6+ generations too late, and an apology from me doesn’t change anything that happened, I still am sincerely and unfathomably sorry for the actions of my ancestors...

And I hope that we all continue learning from our past and the still quite present state of racial injustice in this country so that one day Martin Luther King Jr’s dream can perhaps become reality.

Thanks for reading.