Traces of a Tattered Dream: 60 Years Since the March on Washington
Last week, a tornado rumbled through the Midwest leaving more than a million people without power from Pennsylvania to Michigan. At least 5 people died in the tempest.
I was in a movie theater with one of my daughters when the storm hit.
The multiplex was shut down and we were hurried into groups while we waited out the tornado warning.
There was a tangible urgency in both the movie patrons and the theater employees that ushered us out of the hallways and into the specific theaters with now darkened screens. But in all the hustle and bustle there was zero shock that emergency measures were being taken:
Every mobile device received a piercingly loud push notification that informed all of us of the when, where, what of the tornado warning and how we were to best move to stay as safe as possible.
On a similarly warm August day sixty summers ago, a Black preacher named Dr. Martin Luther King shared his dream at an event called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
It was a gathering where over 250,000 people in a multiracial demonstration for justice. Described by Walter Cronkite as part picnic, church service, and holiday. It was a speech that has been often categorized as the greatest in American history.
And while the ending crescendo is most widely known, it is Dr. King’s description of a nightmare that gives the rousing finish meaning.
He speaks about a century passed since President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Declaration and in spite of this moment as being a beacon of hope for millions of enslaved Black people, in his words “…One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
He goes on to illustrate this duplicitous paradox by saying that America has given Blacks a check marked “insufficient funds”.
This dream that was first framed by a night terror served as an alarm to America. The alarm was sounded, America did hear it then? While we have consistently applauded Dr. King’s dream in the 6 decades since its declaration, what is the state of the dream today?
If a 94 year old Dr. Martin Luther King was with us in 2023, what would he say?
I think any dialogue about the state of the race relations in America, and the progress of Black people (the targeted emphasis of the March on Washington) must start with the reality that progress has been made.
Here’s a list of African American firsts that span sports, law, entertainment, politics, business, among other sectors. This list includes names like Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, Althea Gibson, Hattie McDaniel, Riley Pitts, Gordon Parks, Joyce Nichols, Gail Fisher, Shirley Chisolm, Kamala Harris, and Barack Obama. There have been tremendous breakthroughs and moments of celebration for the lineage of those descendants of the enslaved and the African Diaspora in America.
But like carefully curated filtered pictures on Instagram or Facebook rarely tell the whole story, these highlights obscure the darker reality of the true state of Black America.
If you look at the signs in the above picture and others through a quick google search of that day you will see that there are five main themes that are mentioned:
- Employment: Access to employment opportunities and fair wages
- Voting: Equal accessibility to register as well exercise the right to vote
- Education: Elimination to physical restrictions and equal resources for black students
- Housing: Prohibition of racial discrimination in sales and rental housing
- Police Brutality: Removal of racial profiling in policing and undo force in arrests in black communities.
When we examine these five areas of focus we see that black men are the most likely to be jobless and the unemployment rate of African American men and woman is nearly double the national average.
Though the 1965 Voting Rights Act has been renewed 3 times since it was in enacted, in 2013 the Supreme Court removed a key part of the Voting Rights Act, which allowed states to begin changing their voting laws without procedural protections in place.
Black student enrollment dropped at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA after affirmative action ended. Black undergraduate enrollment at the University of Michigan fell from 7% in the fall of 2006 to 4.4% in the fall of 2022. In 2023, the Supreme Court banned Affirmative Action in College Admissions creating another barrier to education in the face of dropping of black student enrollment.
U.S. homeownership rate increased to 65.5% in 2021, the rate among Black Americans lags significantly (44%), has only increased 0.4% in the last 10 years and is nearly 29 percentage points less than White Americans (72.7%), representing the largest Black-White homeownership rate gap in a decade.
While there is a greater conversation about the state of policing, black people are still killed and harassed more than any other group. This is the middle of a period where the Governor of Arkansas said that teaching Black History is teaching hate. This was right after the Governor of Florida suggested that the slavery helped black people. Black 4th and 5th grade students were singled out and humiliated with teachers attempting to incentivize them with fried chicken during a school assembly.
Saturday August 26th, 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmeter killed 3 Black people in a racially motivated shooting in Jacksonville Florida. This is after Payton S. Gendron killed 10 black people in another racially motivated shooting in Buffalo, New York on May 14th, 2022.
In the 60 years since the March on Washington, the condition that Dr. King spoke of that summer afternoon is still shameful.
But in the midst of the shards and soiled strips of a shattered and tattered dream there are remnants of hope. A renaissance of Black Historians like Earnest Crim III and Jermaine Fowler are teaching Black history in a new way for a new generation.
Black owned conferences like InvestFest, Afro Tech, and FutureCast are helping empower Black entrepreneurs, innovators and futurists. Professional basketball player Jaylin Brown, who recently signed the largest contract in NBA history spoke about how he planned to use his wealth to help bridge wealth gap in Boston. Former police officer Shanita Foster works to create a deeper relationship with local police departments and black communities.
These are just some of the people and projects doing their part to make a difference. Here are five essential elements to breathe life into The Dream:
- Commitment: Mindset to keep going even when we face resistance.
- Conviction: Unwavering belief that we can make a difference
- Accountability: Framework to stay on track and get back on track when missteps happen.
- Empathy: Ability to decenter ourselves to make space to serve others.
- Vision: Seeing a beautiful future through a lens of hope.
Yes, the dream has been battered, bruised, and left for dead. But we in the midst of everything that has happened and is happening, have the power to still carry the dream so it can be fully realized and become true.
“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning: My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not only that, let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. August 28th, 1963
