Entitled “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” King’s speech at Oberlin College in June of 1965 is one of my favorites, having come to my attention only in recent years.

Dr. King recalled Washington Irving’s story about Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep for 20 years. When he began his extended nap, a sign at a nearby inn had a picture of King George III of England emblazoned on it. When Rip awoke two decades later, the sign had a picture of George Washington on it.

The most striking fact about the story, Dr. King reminded his Oberlin College audience, was not the fact that Rip had slept for 20 years but that he had slept through a revolution.

“There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution,” Dr. King said. He then went on to make a remarkable speech challenging all Americans not to sleep through the revolution that was sweeping the nation out of the struggle for human dignity.

When Dr. King said there are too many people in our midst who, in periods of social change, fail “to achieve the new mental outlooks that the very situation demands.” He was speaking to me and other white southerners then of age who had many opportunities to understand, embrace, and work for social change in those early years of confrontation over the social and legal order in the Old South, but did nothing.

Many older than I had an opportunity at the time of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and when sit–ins and demonstrations pressed the case for equal access for all Americans to hotels, restaurants, and movie theatres. I and others had chances at the March on Washington in 1963 and at Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.

In SC in 1968, we could have helped to heal the deep divide that followed the Orangeburg Massacre.

In 1969, we could have reached beyond conventional thinking and supported the MUSC hospital workers in Charleston who were seeking a raise from their $1.30 an hour wage. In 1970, we could have taken a stand for peaceful integration of our public schools following the turning over of a school bus full of children in Lamar.

But while many South Carolinians of good will stepped forward in those days, many of us also did nothing, metaphorically sleeping (it was in many cases a troubled sleep) through a revolution. Put more directly, so many of us simply failed to do our duty as the times demanded. Fortunately, time has been forgiving to us who needed another opportunity to do the right thing, while simultaneously it has been cruel in allowing injustice, inequity, and inequality to remain embedded in our society, forcing the revolution to continue.

That opportunity presented itself in some more recent times as the effort to remove the Confederate flag from atop the State House. The legislative chambers was successfully championed by many of those same white southerners, including me, who a generation and earlier had simply slept.

Many of us now have learned, some gradually, that honest dialog, frank communications, mutual respect, and solid effort can open the door to collaboration for genuine social progress. The newest example of the embodiment of these ideas has come in the special leadership of SC’s own U. S. Senator Lindsey Graham, first acknowledging the genius of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision and leadership, then poignantly pointing to the basic unfairness in the growing disparity of funding of public education in SC’s imperiled rural communities.

Before a packed audience at the Columbia Urban League’s breakfast on MLK Day last month, Senator Graham articulately and eloquently said what so many of us had consciously or unconsciously thought over the last 40 years or so when he asked: “How many of us wished we had met Dr. King at the other side of the bridge, shook his hand and said ‘You are right, Dr. King’ ? ” He then sided with the eight rural school districts that have brought a lawsuit over their inability to fund an adequate education for children in their public schools. “The merits of the claim are real,” Graham said, citing “…years and years of neglect.”

The successor to former Senator Strom Thurmond gave a moving testimony of his own humble beginnings in Seneca and the challenges he faced in becoming successful and making a difference with his life of which his deceased parents could have been proud. His parents died within a few months of each other when he was 20. He then concluded by pledging to continue “to knock down walls…built out of neglect. If you take the hatred out and replace it with caring and attention, anything is possible.”

SC’s goal, Senator Graham stated powerfully and clearly, should be “to fill the void in funding these districts” where learning conditions are so desperate and “come up with an equity funding system for the neglected parts of our state by putting more resources on the table.”

As we look to genuine solutions to SC’s unfinished business of racial reconciliation, economic development, and educational improvements, I believe we have a basis of renewed optimism from the bold leadership of our state’s new senior Senator. I for one am grateful that I woke up to take part, before the revolution is over.

Mr. Rainey is a Columbia attorney and presently serves as

Chairman of the State Board of Economic Advisors