Thomas  article can be read below:My dad called Martin Luther King an  agitator.  I bet a lot of white dads did. Seems like every time Dr. King showed up somewhere, things got torn up or burned up.So we killed him. Not me, of course. I m not a racist. But who thinks he is?Notice how USA Today author Oliver Thomas is quick to point out that he s,  not a racist,  just everyone else.So we tried to fix it. Made his birthday a national holiday. Put him on a pedestal. Where we can honor him. And he can t poke us in the eye.Plus, now we ve squared everything. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. Come on, we ve even elected a black president! That s why people who look like me have a hard time understanding why so many black people are still angry while others have given up on America altogether.I ll let Ta-Nehisi Coates boil it down for you. White society was not achieved through  wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land.  In short, through three centuries of kidnapping, torture, murder and rape. Broken teeth, broken bones and broken spirits. Families ripped apart. Children taken from their parents. Men humiliated in front of their wives. Women brutalized within earshot of their husbands. Lash after bloody lash on bare backs. Then, sleep on a bare wooden floor. No doctor, no dentist, no nothing. Just non-stop misery with a few hymns on Sunday.We built an entire society on these bruised and broken backs. That and countless Native Americans driven off their land. Then, after the house of horrors fell, and the sin was purged by the blood of more than a half-million young mostly white men, white America still did not relent. Despite passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, states found ways to disenfranchise blacks. We took back the vote, cordoned blacks off in the most undesirable parts of our cities, forced them into inferior schools and denied them opportunities. Few blacks owned their homes. Many could not read and write. Thousands were lynched. That s Southern for murdered without a trial. Imagine if that s what black men had done to Robert De Niro or David Bowie for marrying black women.The article can be read in its entirety on USA Today 