Fifty years ago in the early evening of April 4th shots rang out in Memphis, Tennessee at the Lorraine Hotel, and in an instant the man who had a “Dream” was dead. The horror of that moment continues to resonate across the decades and is seared into the consciousness of America’s disturbing racial history as a marker for all time. Nina Simone asks the question in her tribute song to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “What are we going to do now that the King of love is dead?” A question we continue to struggle with five decades later as the advances we have made towards racial justice and equal treatment under the law seem more cosmetic and temporal than permanent or systemically and institutionally driven.
The policies and practices in America are STILL tainted by the power and privilege of a culture that continues to be deeply influenced by a white supremacist dogma and perspective. How can we still be fighting the same battles for voting rights, fair housing, employment, equal pay for equal work, justice in the courts, equal education and equal protection under the law? It’s been decades and our kids are still at risk just because of the color of their skin; our men are more likely to be incarcerated or to be shot by the police than to graduate from college. We are still having to proclaim that our lives matter in an America that touts itself as being the bastion for Freedom and Justice for ALL!” Have we gotten so mesmerized by the “Dream” that we have forgotten that we must have a Vision?
A vision demands a plan, a strategy and engaged participation in implementing the plan. A vision requires active reflection, reorganization and a continuous cycle of strategic preparation and assessment of what is and is not working in order to accomplish a specific set of measurable outcomes. The outcomes must be measurable in order for a strategic plan to be successful. A dream is a beautiful thing, but it connotes a certain passive state of being. In a dreamlike state, you are imagining a time when this or that will happen or you’re just basking in the glow of the “feel good” emotions attached to the act of dreaming. Dreaming requires that you relax into a sleep state or at least an inactive passive state of daydreaming in which we all participate at one time or another.
What would Dr. King say about where we find ourselves today? Would he want us to still be dreaming about freedom, justice and equality fifty years after his assassination for the Dream he proclaimed as the birthright of every citizen of the United States of America? I think not. I believe Dr. King would be horrified by the unending shootings of unarmed Black men by law enforcement officers. He would be mortified by the state of our educational institutions over sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education and disheartened by the clear violations and undermining of the Voting Rights Act and the fact that the residents of Flint, Michigan STILL do not have clean drinking water in 2018.
We live in a nation where the color of your skin STILL matters more than the content of your character. We need to WAKE UP and stop just dreaming. We are all in this boat together and we ALL need to get engaged in turning things around or we are all going down with the ship!
