MLK Day 2008

Listening to the “I Have a Dream” speech, my gut churns; I am shocked with chills. I wish I could attribute the spine-tingling sensation exclusively to the moving rhetoric of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s monumental speech, but to do so would be misreading the symptoms. What I’m really experiencing is fear and anxiety. Reading and listening to Dr. King’s 1963 speech, I am momentarily transported in time, swept up in his vision of a new America, and inspired by his foretelling of a brighter future for black Americans, for all Americans. With him, and with the thousands in his audience, I see before me a future of progress, of racial parity, of brotherhood, of a South where freedom rings. Stretching before us like the glassy water on the National Mall, I envision a pool of potential.

And then as suddenly as I step in, I am snapped back to the real world, shivering with fright.

As I hear Dr. King speaking on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, I think, what would Lincoln say of this scene? Nearly 100 years after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, and the African-American is still not free? I recall the essays of W.E.B. DuBois, who, at the turn of the century, set three, primary goals for the African-American people: freedom, political power, and education. DuBois had met the “sobering realization of the meaning of progress,” yet he still held hope that these goals were obtainable. His philosophies where shaped by the aftermath of the Civil War, and the tides of Reconstruction, and yet his tone was one of determined hope, hope for a day of deliverance from the oppression of slavery, hope for an end to racism, hope for uplift from economic disadvantage, and political disenfranchisement. If, in 1900, the intellectual leaders of black America knew what opposition was mounted against them but had such confidence that it could be overcome, then why, why was Martin Luther King even making his speech in 1963? Why was Martin Luther King, the intellectual, and moral leader of black America in 1963 demanding the same basic, fundamental, civil freedoms that DuBois had asked for in 1903? And how did King do it with such conviction? How, when he knew the history of the African-American struggle, when he knew the universal history of oppressed peoples’ struggle, did he not surrender to despair? I sit here, 45 years after Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial, steeping in it. Anyone with an ounce of concern for humanity and with any hope for its future, must ask why? And How? How, in 2008, are black Americans still overwhelmingly poor, disenfranchised, and failing in school? How, by whose hands, have the dreams of three great men, Lincoln, DuBois, and King, been enslaved to the realm of fantasy? I am overwhelmed with a sense of failure, acutely aware, on this Martin Luther King Day 2008, that America has not been the land of promise that it could have been for the African-American people. I am sorely perplexed that America, the great “social experiment” has failed so horribly at solving the “problem of the color-line.” And I wonder if DuBois’s “Veil” has been lifted far enough off the shoulders of black America to see underneath it America the beautiful, to hear from within it, freedom’s ring. I am sick with chills, and anxious with dread that it has not.