Guest editorial

It’s that time of year again to make a New Year’s resolution. Like the Roman god Janus, we look to our past to see what didn’t work as we hoped and then to the future with a new promise, which we probably will not keep. But we can take comfort in having good intentions.

As a nation, we sometimes make promises that we don’t keep either. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had noted, one such unmet promise has yet to be fulfilled: Equality.

When our Founding Fathers gave us the promissory note that “all men are created equal,” their definition of “men” applied only to rich white men with money and/o...