I have a dream!
Martin Luther King was born on January fifteenth in 1929. He would have been almost thirteen years old when the Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941.
We wonder just how much the Great Depression had an effect on Dr. King because black people had been in a virtual depression since most of them or their ancestors came to this nation as slaves before the American Civil War. Black people lived in a different world than just about anyone else in this country, or, for that matter, most of the rest of the world. The British Empire had abolished slavery of all kinds during the eighteen thirties but the United States had been seperate4d from Britain for quite some time before that event happened and we carried on as if had never happened until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. Even after Lincoln and the war had freed the slaves, in the south, they were not really free. They were kept in a virtual economic and social bondage until the civil rights movement of the fifties and the sixties finally gave them some measure of equality and respect. But there are still those in some numbers in this nation who regard black people as something to be belittled down to this very day.
We were in church yesterday and our new and enlightened pastor reminded us that just a few days before his death, a now defunct St. Louis newspaper ran an editorial stating that Martin Luther King was the most dangerous man in America because violence followed him wherever he went. The pastor then went on to remark about a garbage workers strike in Memphis that had turned violent that was, years later, revealed to be the subversive work of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI who had been out to destroy King for several years before his death. The St. Louis paper that called King so dangerous was the same paper that ran comments in its sports section about the civil rights pioneering pitcher Bob Gibson being a clubhouse lawyer because of his efforts for black advancement in the clubhouse of his team, the St. Louis Cardinals. Clubhouse lawyer was code for being black.
Bob Gibson sits in the Baseball hall of Fame today because of his blazing fastball, his three thousand strikeouts and his efforts to prove that black people were as good at sports as any white person could ever think about being. But he could never have done it if it had not been for the pioneering work of Jackie Robinson and a white person named Branch Rickey who was later with the Cardinals during the Gibson era just before he passed away.
It is questionable just what Martin Luther King would think of 2013 America on the fifth anniversary of the inauguration of the first black president to ever occupy the office of President of the United States. King would have been very proud of the fact that America had elected a black man but he would have been even more proud of the fact that this man was not a token but was more than intelligent enough to not only handle the office but to help bring us out of a near depression that another white man from the south had almost plunged us into over an eight year period that led to near disaster for the country.
We don’t think that Martin Luther King would be very happy with the way that the opposition party has treated the first black president and the way that they have obstructed almost every thing that president Obama has tried to do. But we do not think that Dr. King would be very surprised at what was going on either. Old ways and old prejudices die very hard deaths and spring up anew in the hands of the kind of people who seek profit from what they bring about. Martin Luther King was a minister and he knew, from the stories in the Bible, that people have been the way that they have been for eons.
Martin Luther King once stated that it might become the roll of the blacks in this country to become the conscious and the consciousness for the entire nation. But we wonder if this nation has any real conscious left in it the way that working people are being treated, be they black or white or brown or any of the other colors in the rainbow coalition that the Democratic party has represented for several generation now. There are those who will read this piece who will make fun of the very idea that this sort of thing still exists in this nation as they point out all of the failures that they themselves are so much responsible for.
As for the violence that followed Dr. King, it sprang up across the nation in the aftermath of his death back in 1968 except for in one place. Bobby Kennedy addressed a group of blacks and others in the city of Indianapolis on the night that Martin Luther King’s death was announced. Kennedy quoted verses from many civilized sources and kept the lid on the turmoil that was suddenly engulfing the rest of the nation as a people who had struggled so long saw the leader that they had so loved struck down outside of a motel in a southern city not known for its love for negroes. Kennedy waxed very eloquent and from memory that night but he too lay dead just a couple of months later in the city of the angels out in California.
And so here we are as we recede away from Dr. King and his times and move forward into perilous waters where new leaders will have to emerge to carry the torch if we are to keep any semblance of civilized advancement in this world. Dr. King is now a statue out on the mall in Washington D.C. along with so many others of past centuries who have so affected this nation and its history for good and for bad. Whether there will be any others to join them in the future is, as it always has been, be entirely up to us.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
| 
