On the King Holiday, I didn't hear Gov. John Kasich's short remarks, supposedly honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but I've got a problem with the words in the press that Kasich tersely uttered, to wit: "... Dr. King was a man of action ..."

Sadly, the same could be said about Al Capone, or a host of thousands of bad clowns down through our nation's history, including Gen. Robert E. Lee who, by today's standards, should have been hanged for treasonous and tyrannical abuses of our Constitution.

If Kasich's simplistic snub represents the best description about Dr. King that Kasich can muster, I now completely understand why Kasich today wholeheartedly shuns diversity in picking his new government cabinet.

To think, prior to Kasich's snub about Dr. King's prowess and stature, I thought I didn't like Kasich simply because of Kasich's fortune-making dalliances with Lehman Brothers whom our recent stimulus money bailed out. That undeserving, magnanimous act by President Obama (a black, lest we forget) perhaps assured Kasich ownership of his mortgage-paying edifice (Kasich's choice for his State House) and secured Kasich's life-style, the IRS, et al, net worth amounts which Kasich, to this day, still steadfastly refuses to release to the public.

Because I'm old and black, and because 1 remember a time in America after submitting hundreds of job applications in the 60s, I finally got a chance. To this day, I know I landed an unbelievable job made possible only because of Dr. King's assassination in 1968. My hiring came from a decent, white man, back then, a rare species in Corporate America, who hired me at IBM in 1968 while uttering his company's Mission Statement about race.

I, matching and overly qualified for the job, or so I thought, during the interview, never let him down. That nice man in a big way, taking a chance, had made it possible for me to learn, to grow, and to earn big money (six-figures or approaching) for almost two- and a half-decades, a happenstance back then which begs me to ask today: Just who really is this Kasich guy who now heads our glorious state and who doesn't believe in diversity (fairness to all)? Further, I ask: Under Kasich, will race relations in Ohio go back to Reconstruction? The 1870s? If so, 1 expect the following from Kasich: My bequeathed 18 acres and a mule. Having lived in Chicago for 37 years, heaven help me about what to do about that mule thing. Is a mule in an apartment like a cute, little puppy?

Z. Larry Jenkins

Portsmouth