Remembering the Legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to 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!" -Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. 

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered this speech on August 28, 1963. Three months later the president who supported Civil Rights John F. Kennedy was assassinated and five years later Martin Luther King Jr. was also assassinated. Recently I read a book to a group of children which tried to explain the Civil Rights movement in the most basic terms. They knew enough to know that both Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln both had something to do with freeing black people but they weren’t sure what or who came first or why. How do you as an adult #1 explain slavery and #2 explain the idea that not all people were viewed as equal?

I figured out part of the trouble I was having with these two concepts is we haven’t come that far as a global society in treating each other as equals. In the 1960s when Martin Luther King Jr. was preaching, black and whites couldn’t attend school together. Used textbooks had to stay within the same race school as they were originally used. There was a disparity between black and white schools.  Government money went to more white schools than black schools. Nowadays, government cuts funding to “lower performing schools” while Congress lines their pockets with campaign contributions from testing corporations. In California voters overturned Proposition 13 which resulted in a cut in local property tax revenue of $6 Billion. Schools districts lost, on average, half their property tax revenue. Despite government “bailouts” thirty four years later California schools and schools in other states still feel the affects of Proposition 13 and other propositions like it. There is still a disparity not necessarily between different races but between different income levels. The top 1% can send their kids to private schools where the student to teacher ratio is 15 to 1 instead of 40 to 1. The government refuses to raise taxes on the uber rich taxes so public schools for the rest of 99% have a fighting chance. “I remember America; And I remember my schools; Now it's graft and gangs and guards and guns and needles in the pool; I remember America; When kids could walk alone; Go to the corner for a root beer float and safely make it home.” These lyrics are from the song “I Remember America” by the late folk singer/songwriter John Stewart, who traveled with Bobby Kennedy on the campaign trail.

 John Stewart goes on to sing “I remember America; I remember my home
That any working man would proudly say it was something that he owned.” Now even the working man and woman have their house foreclosed on, even with a two income family. Meanwhile, corporations shut factories down and send their business out of the country. Instead of unions they can pay pennies on the dollar for cheap labor in India or China. Entire towns become ghost towns with boarded up houses because it was cheaper in the short run for the corporations to shut the factory down which directly or indirectly accounted for 100% of the town’s collective income. As country singer John Rich sings “While they’re livin’ it up on Wallstreet in that New York City town, here in the real world they’re shuttin’ Detroit down.” Even chain grocery stores get their produce from Chile or Mexico. Meanwhile Congress votes to divert water from the farm lands in the Central Valley of California to Orange County, where coincidentally a great many of the 1% live. Then the country wonders why the price of groceries has gone up or why roads haven’t been fixed, or why gasoline prices have gone up or why it costs so much to buy a car or build a building or why the unemployment rate is so high. Simple, Congress has allowed US companies to ship their business overseas thus we are a nation of consumers not producers. Nothing is made in the USA anymore except money for the 1%.

A while back I posted a picture of a woman holding a sing that said “I’m okay with Mosques but Wal-Mart really scares me” on facebook. It sparked a debate between two of my friends, one a man who is a retired United States Marine and a woman who is an Australian citizen married to an Egyptian man who splits her time between Egypt and Australia. It was interesting to see their different perspectives on Islam and Christianity. Martin Luther King Jr. said as part of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech that “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!" In the United States we can pretty much do that now we have freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech. The people of Egypt and other parts of the Middle East have been fighting for these and other rights which Americans take for granted.  What their debate made me realize is Social Networking sites and the World Wide Web have created this global community where people from every area of the globe can come together and exchange ideas. We may not “join hands” as Dr. King said, heck we may not even always agree but for the most part we, as individuals are respectful of each other and aren’t spraying each other with fire hoses or tear gas as they were during the Civil Rights movement. Yet the non-violence that Gandhi and Dr. King preached still holds for the most part even in Egypt when the tanks are rolling in and the people are being sprayed with tear gas. That’s when the mainstream media gets interested, when “it bleeds, it leads.” What you don’t see in the mainstream media are the Muslims standing outside a church protecting their Coptic Christian brethren inside or the Christians standing around protecting their Muslim brethren so they could pray. You don’t see Mosque and a church working together as makeshift hospitals or doctors being assaulted for treating patients at both.

In the book that I read to the kids it explained the reason for Martin Luther King’s assassination as someone who didn’t believe as Martin Luther King Jr. believed that everyone should be equal.  Whether the terrorists from 9/11 or Islamic extremists, or the Taliban or the Egyptian military or the dictators still in charge there are still those in the world who believe that not “all men are created equal” or in “freedom of religion” or in freedom of any kind for that matter. The idea is not to bring the American “ideal” to other countries the idea is to help the citizens of other countries be free to make their own decision about what kind of life they want. So the question becomes is it possible for the dream Martin Luther King Jr. shared with this country big enough to share with the rest of the world and is it possible for Americans to live up to the dream?