Memo to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:

In this first decade of the 21st century, your dream of a land in which black and white children would play together oblivious of racial differences has come a long way toward fulfillment. The United States is not yet completely color-blind, but as the nation observed the holiday in your honor nearly 40 years after your assassination, there were convincing signs that your death was not in vain.

Take Tiger Woods, for example. Although his heritage is a mixture of African and Asian, his black genes, in your era, probably would have consigned him to a job as caddy at most elite golf clubs. Now he’s recognized as the world’s premier golfer and is the center of a controversy. The measure of your success is that the controversy does not center on his right as a non-white to compete in top tournaments. It centers on a golf commentator who, in a moment of careless levity, used the word “lynch” in connection with Tiger.

Kelly Tilghman, an anchor for cable TV’s Golf Channel, was talking with fellow commentator Nick Faldo about the challenge faced by other golfers attempting to defeat Woods.

“Maybe they should just gang up for a while,” said Faldo.

“Lynch him in a back alley,” Tilghman replied, laughing as she spoke.

Now let it be said that the specter of lynch-mob terror is now well in the past. The era of lynching is something the nation would rather forget. Nothing in Kelly Tilghman’s background suggests that she would ever dream of advocating a lynching.

Tiger Woods responded through his agent, Mark Steinberg: “Tiger and Kelly are friends, and Tiger has a great deal of respect for Kelly. Regardless of the choice of words used, we know unequivocally that there was no ill intent in her remarks.” Nevertheless, Kelly apologized to Woods personally.

If it was no big deal to the golfer, it was to the Rev. Al Sharpton. Sharpton, one of many activists who have tried to assume your mantle, demanded that Tiger’s friend be fired. Her network semi-complied: It suspended her for two weeks.

But the controversy didn’t stop there. Golfweek, a magazine with a circulation of 160,000, covered the brouhaha and illustrated it with a cover image of a noose. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Again, the intent was benign, though the judgment was abysmal. The editor of the magazine lost his job.

I had only a fleeting opportunity to meet you and exchange pleasantries some 45 years ago, Dr. King, but I was part of the generation that watched you take on the club-wielding cops, the police dogs, the courts and the angry crowds as you used non-violence as a weapon against oppression. And I think I can guess your response to all this: The reference to lynching was just a light-hearted metaphor. Don’t make more of it than it deserves. The civil rights movement has buried most of its enemies; don’t make new ones.

As you can see, Dr. King, things have changed a great deal for the better when the issue over lynching involves a metaphor instead of the reality.

There remain a few sore spots, which people on both sides of the racial line are wont to aggravate and inflame. The Confederate battle flag, for example.

Sharpton made a big deal last year out of the fact that the vice president of the United States went hunting at a gun club that had a battle flag hanging inside a garage. It wasn’t even clear that the door was open at the time the vice president went hunting. But it was worth a few headlines, most of them offensive to those Americans who regard the battle flag as a symbol of their heritage and not as a racist emblem.

But of course many Americans do have visceral reactions to the flag that has been flaunted by lynch mobs and waved at Klan and neo-Nazi rallies since Robert E. Lee furled it honorably at Appomattox. The flag triggers dramatically different emotions in blacks and in many whites who keep their Confederate ancestors in warm memory. That’s why it can never be a unifying symbol in states that contain substantial numbers of both races.

A Mobile camp of Sons of Confederate Veterans has raised a 12-by-18-foot battle flag atop an 80-foot pole in clear view of motorists on Interstate 10. Since nobody has attempted to outlaw the private display of a battle flag, the SCV gestures has the look of a schoolyard taunt.

Merceria Ludgood, a black member of the Mobile County Commission, responded the way I believe you would have responded, Dr. King: “It’s certainly their right to do it [but] they’re out of step in where people are in this issue.”

She’s right, of course. The flag isn’t intended to inspire racial oppression; it’s an effort at getting a little respect for a mindset that history is leaving behind. Nobody is going to go out and hold a lynching under the flag. There may be a few — a minuscule few — who might like to do it, but they’re confronted with a sobering reality: In today’s South, anyone who carries out a lynching could very well be arrested by black law-enforcement officers and tried before a black judge and a jury on which blacks would be well represented.

That’s how far we’ve come since your death, Dr. King. Rest in peace.