Wednesday, August 28, 2013

A dream is not enough

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Fifty years ago, on Aug. 28, 1963, as the March on Washington was winding down, the last speaker for the day’s event was a young preacher from Alabama named Martin Luther King.
    At the podium, King’s tone and cadence morphed from speaking into preaching, inspiring the assembled masses, and the larger nation as well, with words about his dreams and vision. Fifty years later, that dream is still living, still inspiring, and still not fully realized.
    King’s words described his dream and inspired many of the people who heard him, just as President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration speech had done two years earlier. Many hoped that no matter what else was to happen, the dream would live on and come to fruition.
    Today the dream has not been all that we wished it would be.
    Among African-Americans, the unemployment rate is higher today than it was when King described his dream of a world of equality of opportunity. Despite the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that held that separate education cannot be equal and that opened the door for racial integration, public education remains largely segregated.
    The reality in 2013 is far too reminiscent of what it was in 1963. Jim Crow attitudes still hold powerful sway.
    State legislators across the country are passing proof-of-identification laws to make voting increasingly difficult for poor, rural, elderly and especially minority populations. Legislative gerrymandering is making a mockery of the dream of one-man one-vote.
    In North Carolina, students at a historically black college face constant challenges to their status as legal voters while the residency of students at a nearly all-white Christian college in the same district are never questioned.
    Dreams deferred are dreams denied.
    The “I Have a Dream” speech is part of what is commonly known as The March on Washington, but that is not the official name of that occasion. Somehow, 50 years later, no one remembers that it was actually called the March for Jobs and Justice.
    The Dream speech was and is still inspiring. But what we also know is that a dream is not enough. What we have sadly learned over the decades is that a dream, an impossible dream, or any other kind of dream, can be distorted and altered. What we do know is that unless we are rigorous, diligent and dedicated to the cause of justice, we will find ourselves with very different dreams, which are not at all about the content of a person’s character, but, sometimes tragically, about the color of a person’s skin.

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