Is Dr. King’s Dream becoming a reality?
19th January 2021 · 0 Comments
An Analysis
By C.C. Campbell-Rock
Contributing Writer
As the nation and the world commemorates the 92nd anniversary of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth (January 15, 1929), an analysis of his famous “I Have A Dream” speech indicates that many aspects of his prescient vision are coming true.
“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”
This part of Dr. King’s dream has come true. Not only have Georgians sent four African Americans to the U.S. House of Representatives, but in January 2021, they sent a Jewish man and a Black man, who campaigned together to the U.S. Senate and flipped Georgia blue. Also, the grand city of Atlanta is led by a Black woman, Keisha Lance Bottom, who, like her fellow elected officials, sits down at the table of brotherhood with white constituents, employees and peers daily.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.” Surely, when the nation elected the Honorable Barack H. Obama, it’s first African-American president, a majority of voters of every race, chose him specifically for the content of his character, not his skin color.
“I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of ‘interposition’ and ‘nullification,’ one day right there in Alabama little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.”
Although school desegregation in Alabama and nationwide has been a challenge since Dr. King and the SCLC worked to integrate the Alabama public school system, there have been modest successes. Some schools have minimally integrated student bodies, but few have student ratios that are 50-50 with Black and white students joining hands. And there are signs of resegregation in the nation’s public school. This part of Dr. King’s dream remains largely unfulfilled at the primary and secondary school levels.
However, some progress has been made in the political arena, as a result of Dr. King and others in the modern Civil Rights Movement, who influenced many to seek public office.
Congresswoman Terri A. Sewell is in her sixth term representing Alabama’s 7th Congressional District. She is one of the first women elected to Congress from Alabama in her own right and is the first Black woman to ever serve in the Alabama Congressional delegation. Sewell joined a bipartisan group of 231 Members of Congress in voting to impeach President Donald Trump for willfully inciting violence against the U.S. government last week.
The day after the 2020 presidential election, Alabama voters approved a measure that would begin the process of deleting racist language from the state’s 119-year-old constitution, which was approved to entrench white supremacy as state law during the Jim Crow era.
Dr. King’s vision of unity between Blacks and white came true in the spring and summer of 2020, when the Black Lives Matter Movement and Blacks, whites and humanity’s rainbow took to the streets, worldwide, to demand an end to the killing of unarmed Black people by police and white supremacists, beginning with the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota.
“Protests in hundreds of cities, in every state, have had large and sometimes majority-white crowds. White women made themselves human shields to protect Black protesters. White superstar athletes, such as NFL quarterbacks Tom Brady and Joe Burrow, signed petitions and tweeted support. Utah’s Republican Sen. Mitt Romney joined the cause. Apple committed $100 million to a racial justice fund; the NFL increased its commitment to $250 million. Museums and corporations supported the protests,” according to an article in The Undefeated, a sports-oriented website.
“Although white people have been part of the Black freedom struggle since the days of the Underground Railroad, their participation,” in the Black Lives Movement is unparalleled in American History.
“Two-thirds of U.S. adults say they support the movement, with 38 percent saying they strongly support it. This sentiment is particularly strong among black Americans, although majorities of white (60%), Hispanic (77%) and Asian (75%) Americans express at least some support,” according to a Pew Charitable Trust poll.
About justice, Dr. King said, “…But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. With the help of national civil rights organizations, Louisiana attorneys successfully argued against one of Louisiana’s Jim Crow laws.
Since Dr. King’s speech, his dream for the security of justice is constantly being realized through the election of Black judges and the work of Black attorneys, nationwide.
In Louisiana, African-American attorneys joined by attorneys with the NAACP-LDF and the Lawyers Committee on Civil Rights, and other legal groups, have been undoing racist state laws for decades.
Black and white attorneys in Louisiana filed the Chisom case, which began in 1986 and culminated with a 1991 U.S. Supreme Court decision that mandated a Consent Decree. The Chisom Consent Decree created a seat on the Louisiana State Supreme Court, divided the court’s multi-parish First District, which was designed to dilute the Black vote in New Orleans, and seated the first African-American associate justice, the late Justice Revius Ortique, and the first African-American woman to be over the entire state court system, Chief Justice Bernette Joshua Johnson. Attorneys also filed an anti-police brutality lawsuit which culminated in a consent decree for the NOPD and a criminal justice reform consent decree for the Orleans Parish Prison System.
In April 2020 justice was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which struck down Louisiana’s 1898 Jim Crow law, the non-unanimous jury law, which was used to deny the accused a 12- member jury of their peers.
“And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, ‘When will you be satisfied?’ We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality…No, no, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” Dr. King said.
“Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.”
Black civil rights leaders did go back down south and continued the fight for justice and equality. The late Congressman John Lewis, Hosea Williams, and other members of the Reverend King’s inner circle – former Atlanta Mayor and U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and his Rainbow Coalition, the late Ernest Dutch Morial, former mayor of New Orleans, the late Judge Israel Augustine, who drew up the incorporation papers for the SCLC – and numerous others carried the work forward and passed the civil rights baton to successive generations.
“It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality…And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual,” Dr. King told the tens of thousands assembled at the March on Washington March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on March 28,1963.
An assassin’s bullet silenced Dr. King’s voice on April 4, 1968. He was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was in Memphis to march with sanitation workers who were striking for higher pay. He was 39 years old. In the months before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. became increasingly concerned with the problem of economic inequality in America.
However, those who have followed in his footsteps, seeking justice and economic equality, are inching ever closer to his goal of economic freedom for Americans. The fight for $15 has landed in the agenda of President-elect Joe Biden who promises to also address other economic concerns in Black communities, including redlining in lending, small business loans, etc.
Black people have come a long way toward realizing Dr. King’s dream. While the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is no longer on earth, the timeless dream of this self-described drum major for justice continues to be the wind beneath his people’s wings.
This article originally published in the January 18, 2021 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
