Jack's Essay: Dream Deferred - 12/1/05

  Here’s something that boggles my mind.  Martin Luther King has been dead now for nearly as long as he was alive. Hard to believe, but he was only 39 when he died. This April, it will be 38 years since he was murdered. I think about him a lot. You may think that odd, since I am a white guy. But he was the conscience of our nation.

  Journalists love telling people stuff they don’t know. I imagine walking into a room in heaven and meeting Martin, and his saying. “So, what’s happened with our nation since 1968? What happened to my dream?” You know the dream, the one he spoke of in his famous speech after the March on Washington in 1963.

  What would I tell him? Part of me would like to say, Reverend King, in the America of 2005, nobody in Alabama or Mississippi would even think of trying to deny black people the right to vote.

  Reverend King, since you died, Birmingham, Alabama has elected a black mayor. Virginia has elected a black governor.

There are black astronauts and black heads of major corporations and major universities. Most African Americans did not vote for the current President of the United States.

But he has had two African-American secretaries of state, and the current one is a woman who, as a child, was a close friend of one of the four little girls killed when racists bombed that church in Birmingham in 1963.

  That’s what I would like to tell Martin Luther King.

  But I would also have to tell him that we’ve pretty much failed at becoming the America he dreamed about. 

  I’d have to tell him that in the America of 2005, integration mostly just means the time from the day the first black family moves in to the time the last white family moves out.

  I would have to tell Martin Luther King that many black Americans in 2005 have lives of despair without hope. That too many of them live in a twilight world that the upper classes -- black as well as white -- try to ignore.

  And I would tell him that while children are still made to memorize parts of that great speech, too many adults have forgotten the line  about white people.

  “Their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. “We cannot walk alone.”

And then I would ask, Dr. King -- what do we do now?

Comments

[Phyllis Prebble]

I was so disappointed not to be able to get into the discussion today.
I am a retired Social Worker who has lived in Flint, Grand Rapids, Muskegeon, Rural West Michigan and now in Lansing and I am here to tell you that racism is alive and well in Michigan today and has been since I arrived in Michigan in 1950 as a child.
In every area where I have lived including, in the rural area of White Cloud where I grew up, I have experienced discrimination. (In the town, I was told as a student at the high school by the only counselor that I should not pursue a college preparatory curriculum because my family was poor and "colored" and I would never be able to attend college and would only be able to get a job cleaning other people's houses or cooking, anyway. This, dispite the fact, as I learned years later, that I had scored higher than any student from that school district had ever scored. My daughter was given this information by the same counselor- he gave her the additional information that no one else had scored as high as I had since- who'd told me I'd never go to college. I graduated from GVSU in 1976.)
I suffered racism as a young adult in Grand Rapids when trying to get an apartment in white areas of Grand Rapids because although I appear to be white, my husband at the time was black and it showed. I was discriminated against in black areas of the city for the reverse, they thought I was a white woman married to a black man. I was locked out of jobs because I indicated on applications that I was black.
I have been refused credit and or charged higher rates because I indicated that I am black on credit applications and or lived in areas of cities where it was presumed that only blacks or the very poor would live. you name it, I have experienced it.
I don't things have improved for blacks or other minorities in my lifetime very much. Granted they have improved some. I hear all the time that Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society was a failed program, I beg to differ! That program was directly responsible for giving me the opportunity to go to college and make a better life for myself and my children. I have three children. They are all fairly successful in their own fields. They would probably not have had the opportunity to do as well as they have if I had not had the opportunity to complete my own education and demontrate to them the difference that having education beyond the secondary level. President Johnson's Great Society is responsible for that education.
I don't think things will change until others are given the same chance I was given to make better lives for themselves and their families. I also think that as long as people of differing backgrounds don't talk to each other nothing will change very much.