A time when dreams are coming true
MORE WORKS LIES AHEAd to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of equality complete
If he were gazing down from above, Martin Luther King Jr. probably was smiling Monday. On the day set aside each year to celebrate his legacy, a black man was inaugurated president of the United States for the second time. In many ways, the dream King spoke of in his famous speech 50 years ago has become reality.
“King talked about how he had a dream that one day his four children … would not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character,” Rev. Darryl Gray said at a ceremony Monday at Montreal’s city hall marking Martin Luther King Day and the launching of the 22nd edition of Black History Month in February. “Dr. King is looking down upon us and shaking his head in affirmation. He is saying that a lot of his dream has been realized. … We have overcome.”
But the inequalities and poverty that persist indicate more work lies ahead, Gray added.
The theme of this year’s edition of Black History Month, “Now is the Time, ” is taken from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech delivered in August 1963 before 200,000 supporters in Washington, considered a turning point in the U.S. civil rights movement. (“We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now,” King intoned in his soaring baritone. “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. … Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”)
Among the 800 events planned for Black History Month — including talks, conferences, movies, music and artistic performances — is a free public exhibition called MLK 50, curated by Karl-André St-Victor, and to be presented at Place des Arts presenting archival photos and text documenting the history of King and the civil-rights movement, and the works of six artists who have reinterpreted King’s speech.
Black History Month has been growing in size and prominence the past few years, thanks to a wider publicity campaign and events like MLK 50 that reach a wide audience as opposed to “staying only in black neighbourhoods,” said Nadia Rousseau, treasurer for the Round Table on Black History Month, which helps organize events. The event is still needed, she said, because black history, and the history of many other minorities, is still not taught in the schools, and role models for children are lacking.
“I think it’s more for the young that we are doing this, because we have to pass on the message, the models, the history, the key elements to make them proud and to empower them,” she said. “The message is not from black to black, but black to the whole community.”
Highlighting the contribution of black society to the city’s history not only opens doors with all Quebecers, it also enhances the city’s reputation, councillor Mary Deros said.
“Our city distinguishes itself through diversity, while the wealth created by these communities is a key factor in the development of a fair and inclusive society.”
Despite that wealth, councillor Frantz Benjamin noted there is a marked dearth of corporate sponsorship for the events. “It’s not just a month for blacks, it’s a month for all Quebecers and all Montrealers, so I deplore the quasi-absence of the private sector,” he said.
While Barack Obama may have ascended, the dearth of blacks in municipal, provincial or federal politics, or as policemen or firefighters, and disproportionately high unemployment rates indicates the dream remains, Gray noted. In his time, King said the root problems of violence and incarceration seen in all communities were not based on racism, but borne of poverty. That, Gray said, has not changed.
Black History Month runs from Feb. 1 to 28, with events planned throughout Quebec. Special events include the civil rights exhibition MLK 50 to be presented at Place des Arts from Feb. 5 to 18; and the Ebony Writers Exhibition showcasing Quebec and Canada’s leading black writers at Montreal city hall from Jan. 29 to Feb. 16. For the full program of events, visit moishistoiredesnoirs.com and click on Activities.
WASHINGTON — A 13-yearold student from Omaha, Neb., named Leon Gordon, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in a star-spangled slouch hat and squinted into the democratic sun. He was part of a group from Nebraska that had travelled for 24 hours without an overnight halt. Now, at eight in the morning on Inauguration Day, the tourists still had four hours to sightsee before U.S. President Barack Obama would swear his final, ritual oath, more than a mile up the Mall.
“Do you know that Omaha has the third-highest AfricanAmerican murder rate in the country?” Leon announced, by way of acquainting me with his corn-fed hometown and his own — and the president’s — demographic. “Where I live, I hear gunfire every night.”
“Has anybody ever shot YOU?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he replied. “But only with BBs.”
It was a beautiful morning, typical of a Washington winter so temperate that the forsythias lining the Army barricades were in full yellow riot and even a few cherry blossoms had busted through, two months early. Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural in 1985 had been held on a day so cold that the swearing-in was moved indoors; in 1961, John F. Kennedy’s oath-taking came in the wake of snow so deep and bright that it blinded even the sublime vision of the poet Robert Frost. But that was before human-caused (and Republican-denied) climate change warmed the globe; today, the thousands streaming from the Metro would hardly need their parkas and minks.
It was Leon Gordon, Jr.’s first time in his capital. He went in to gaze at the great seated effigy of Father Abraham and I pointed him to the words of Lincoln’s second inaugural address that are inscribed on the memorial’s northern wall, the conciliatory speech in which the Great Emancipator formally, finally ascribes the cause of the Civil War to slavery and reasons that, should God ordain that the war continue:
until every last drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid with another drawn with the sword ... so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Then we went outside and stood on the terrace — it is marked with a plaque — where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in the summer of 1963, invoking his wish that “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
“Has the dream been fulfilled?” I asked young Leon, who had been selected to move from an all-black elementary school to the Nathan Hale Magnet Middle School, where he is avidly pursuing his own independent re- search in African-American history and genealogy.
(“I’d like to go to HIS inauguration,” one of Leon’s teachers told the Omaha NewsHerald last week. “He can be anything he wants to be.”)
“Everyone is prejudiced in his own way,” the boy answered. “Not necessarily racist — that’s what you are when you ACT on your prejudice. But America was BUILT on racism. It’s always been that way.”
Oneof the visiting Midlanders, as Nebraskans call themselves, was a white woman named Danielle Martinec, a single mom whose five- and eight-year-olds attend an allwhite Catholic school. Here was Obama’s America in a nutshell: The black teen being given a chance to go as far as his talents will take him; the white parent airlifting her progeny rather than allow them to share a classroom with differently-tinted kids.
“Isn’t that a little messedup?” Martinec shrugged. “They don’t get exposed to anything except Catholic stuff.” She blamed this on her ex, a police officer whom she labelled as less than an admirer of the African race.
“What’s YOUR dream?” I asked Leon as we stood there in the sunshine and invoked Abraham Lincoln and Dr. King and Obama as the sacred, secular trinity of American promise, failure, renewal, shame and pride. Thus will history regard them, a century from now — three men confronting, each in his own way, the tangled legacy of a nation whose founders were, in Lincoln’s words, “wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.”
“It may sound crazy,” Leon said, “but my dreams come to me like little movie clips, little moments of my life, and I wake up and I wonder, ‘Is that my destiny?’ ”
“Has Barack Obama made a difference in your neighbourhood?” I wondered.
“Evidently not,” Leon replied.
Now the ceremony was beginning, so I moved down the Mall to watch one of the big screens with the unticketed heathen and to listen to what the 44th president would tell us in the shadow of the sainted 16th. But the sound system was cutting in and out, and the video didn’t work at all; it was as if Obama was calling in his second inaugural address on Skype from Neptune.
I was standing next to an African-American businessman from Atlanta — Waytus Shelton, 56, helps companies such as Bank of America collect moneys due from deadbeats. He told me that his own family could boast of “six generations of education.”
“What has Barack Obama done for you?” I posed to the man from Georgia.
“He’s helped me with nothing, because I’ve ASKED him for nothing,” he replied. “No welfare. NOTHING. What he HAS given me, and what he has given this country, is the insight that a black man can sit in the highest office in the world and still be a good husband, a good father, a good man.”
On the garbled feed from the Capitol, the president was proclaiming “that the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal — is the star that guides us still.”
“I UNDERSTAND race,” Shelton said. “And I believe that, in another 60 years, there won’t be a need for us to be having this conversation. I look at my daughter and she has Chinese friends, white friends, homosexual friends — I’m not homophobic, but that’s something that was just not accepted in the black community I grew up in. But she is accepting of this, and it makes me think that, in 60 years, there will be differences we can’t even imagine.”
“He really HAS given me hope,” the Georgian said. “I mean, what else do we HAVE but hope?”