When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled around the country in the 1960s, preaching to millions about the need to treat one another equally, Americans listened.

For too many of us, that’s all we did.

Equality comes not only in the form of having the same rights and opportunuties extended to all, but in how we assimilate.

And, whether you like government or not, it’s fair to point out that government has taken the lead in working to ensure equality and promote integration.

As a nation, Americans have been slow to follow – blacks and whites alike.

Schools are integrated, but that is largely because school leaders establish attendance patterns that seek to bring students of different races together. If housing patterns alone were left to determine school attendance, we would have many schools with student populations made up largely of one race or another.

Government has worked to ensure that discrimination in the work place is reduced or eliminated. Companies have responded to the law and the workplace is more integrated today than it has ever been.

Churches, sadly, haven’t gotten the message. Sundays at 11 a.m., as the cliché goes, continues to be the most segregated hour of the week.

Time will help. As the generations who remember the days of segregation get smaller, the force of habit will be less influential than it is today.

But there will always be a need, collectively, for our society to consider inclusion in all that it does.

Diversity is a sign of richness. It makes our life experience better and we benefit from exposure to people who, in whatever way, are not like us.

It’s hard to say how Martin Luther King Jr. might view the state of equal rights today if he were still alive.

But, like so many things, we can praise our successes, admit our shortcomings and work to do a better job.