The dream at fifty!
It was fifty years ago today that the reverend Martin Luther King Jr. led his famous march to the mall in Washington, D.C. that culminated with his also famous “I have a dream” speech.
The King speech is regarded by many, but not all, as one of the three or four greatest elocutions in American history. It is mentioned along with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as an enunciation of the goals and desires of a generation, and the generations before it, who had lived in such despair that they could not even speak of what the future might bring as it was cast in so much of the past.
This writer has seen so much in his sixty four years on this planet. We have written frequently about seeing black people burned out of their community after an incident involving young black misjudgment that did not really involve them at all except that they also happened to be black. We have seen, in our childhood, black people taken advantage of by the bigoted Illinois judicial system as the only way that they had to achieve a better life, their automobile, was taken from them to satisfy falsified speeding tickets as they passed through our part of the country on their way to the north and economic and other freedoms. And we remember traveling through the south and seeing the burned out remains of a freedom riders bus staring at us from the side of a South Carolina road. And, we, like others, have seen the giver of that speech about dreams assassinated in a southern town as he tried to further his peoples ambitions for a better life that might include more than an existence.
And now, we have lately seen the still white dominated south and other parts of the country begin to limit what is perhaps the most precious and hard won right that an American can hold: the right to vote. There are individuals of all races in this nation who are far older than we are who have seen the full circle almost close as they have seen their rights expanded and then begin to contract once again as they have been able to grasp the dream and then begin to see it torn from their still clinched fists by those who have never had to experience what they have seen across a long lifetime. We have seen, in the last election, a one hundred year old black woman have to stand in line for hours to vote in Florida as she continues to sacrifice for her precious rights.
And we wonder, quite frankly, what the seventy fifth or one hundredth anniversaries of Dr. King’s speech will look like or if it will even be remembered at all if the world is controlled by the kind of individual who has always hated what the whole thing stood for to begin with. Sometimes dreams fade away the further we get from dreaming them. The generation who dreamed those dreams grows older by the day and they are the only ones who truly remember what it was like to have lived the entirety of the experiences that they lived through. Like most of the young, blacks who have taken for granted what their forbearers went through, do not even realize the prices that were paid by so many for what they take for granted today. But, still yet, a Trayvon Martin can walk down the sidewalk of a gated subdivision and lose his life to a person who obviously did not like nor understand him at all. Innocence is no protection against what elements of this world think and are willing to do with those thoughts.
We have, after fifty years of progress, a black president in the White House but it is still, for so many, only a white house and he is merely, in their eyes, an interloper there who will be fumigated out of it at the first opportunity. In so many ways, the dream of Dr. King has become a rapidly spreading nightmare that those who hate have been experiencing and are willing to spread to the rest who have merely been content to live their lives. Martin Luther King was not just concerned about blacks. He was also concerned about the poor and the underprivileged that his faith had taught him through his Jesus would always need our help. The attack against the dream goes far beyond just blacks. Those who hate have a dream of a world that existed before people like King ever came along and that dream is being enacted by them each and every day as they kill the freedoms that a gentle people of limited financial means but big hearts have lived for the last fifty years.
Whether Dr. King’s dream remains so is dependant on us, the living, as we watch those who fought for it pass from the scene. One hundred year old voters willing to stand in a line will likely not be around much longer but those who create the lines will never leave us as long as they and their children born of prejudice can take breath. In less than five years we will commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death while those who hate will celebrate that same event with a great rejoicing. It is the way of life and very evident corruptible human nature and all we can do is to continue to dream and to fight for those dreams.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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