Dream Deferred

Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

¹ “Throughout 1966 and 1967 King increasingly turned the focus of his civil rights activism throughout the country to economic issues. He began to argue for redistribution of the nation's economic wealth to overcome entrenched black poverty. In 1967 he began planning a Poor People's Campaign to pressure national lawmakers to address the issue of economic justice.”

“² But 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 an exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.”

Now, almost 46 years since the unfortunate death of Martin Luther King, Jr., "³ the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education" continues as a 'dream deferred'. Some people are quick to say that ample means has been given to those who reside in poverty-stricken areas through government fundings such as Welfare and Food Stamps. This is clearly incorrect because a need for housing and nutrition are merely a requirement for basic survival. Instead we need to comprehend the fact that Crime is the enemy and Education is the solution. However; without a decrease in Crime, Education can not be achieved.

Generally speaking: Few people would take out a loan to open a Business or invest Real Estate in a high crime area because only a small number of customers could afford to patronize. Therefore; a Business and/or Real Estate property opening in a lesser crime area receives more customers and income, allowing Business taxes to be paid. A proportion of those taxes then goes back into the local area Community toward covering expenses such as Police Officers and Education.

The black community tend to dominate poverty-stricken areas only because without the necessary funds, crime increases/education decreases and the means to circumvent are diminished; creating a vicious circle that is repeated from family to families. However; numerous multicultural and illegal immigrants living in these already high-poverty areas also contribute greatly to the poverty levels, an increase in discrimination, turf wars, and other crimes. Some Cops tend to turn a blind eye to the majority of crimes because there is not enough funds to afford the number of Police Officers needed.

Drug dealers have become the modern day slave owners. Regardless of your ethnicity; if you are addicted to drugs, you have imprisoned your body. You owe the drug dealer and the drug dealers own you. If you can't pay for your habit and crime isn't paying enough, there's always a pimp waiting somewhere to own you and put your body to work to feed your habit.

It's not as if drug dealers earn their money off the addiction of other human beings then move out of these poverty areas. Perhaps because most drug dealers are themselves slaves to the drug addiction. Nonetheless; drug dealers are merely puppets, slaves also to the drug suppliers who live lavishly out of the far reaching arms of the law in some resort eating lobster claws.

Meanwhile; due to crime, these communities unable to get the funds needed to give a proper education to the children; the schools have merely become a place for drugs to be bought and sold. However; with an adequate education, children have a better chance of graduating, getting better jobs and/or attending college to better their income to move into a better community to create a better world for their children. Children who may grow up to become the next Martin Luther King Jr. to continue the non-violent fight of the discrimination and segregation that still lingers 'in the corners of American society' today.

So before we can have a "⁴ let's have a ceasefire on violence for #MLK", before anyone says Welfare and Food Stamps are enough; try living in these high crime areas of poverty, deprived of economic funds of thriving businesses... Then when the bullets fly from drive-by shootings and you hide under the bed only later to learn a stray bullet left your brother or sister or someone in your family dead, then you tell me society has done enough to help.

⁵ Harlem
BY LANGSTON HUGHES
What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
We must keep The Dream alive for the betterment of all humankind, socially and economically; we must not let The Dream 'dry up'.

Honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., a ⁶ Pastor, Leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. A man also known as “Dr. King” who earned his Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Boston University in 1955. A 1964 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. "⁷ Today we pay tribute to Martin Luther King, the man who has never abandoned his faith in the unarmed struggle he is waging, who has suffered for his faith, who has been imprisoned on many occasions, whose home has been subject to bomb attacks, whose life and the lives of his family have been threatened, and who nevertheless has never faltered." (Born January 15, 1929, Assassinated April 4, 1968)

Related Post: Lucretia I am a black woman, or as some would say, “African-American”, I live in a country where the melting pot has boiled over, Seeping discrimination and crime...

Related Links:

A Dream Deferred 2014: The Future of African American Education

Join us at A Dream Deferred to discuss new solutions, share best practices and collaborate with colleagues to make a difference for African American students counting on all of us to help them succeed.

Share Your Dreams at The King Center

American Dreams Deferred (a documentary by William Caballero): "A young Latino man juggles unconditional family love with the challenge of breaking the cycle that has kept some relatives from reaching their dreams. Set against a backdrop of Coney Island and Fayetteville, North Carolina, an NYU graduate student turns the camera on his Puerto Rican-American family plagued by social, medical and public health issues. U.S. health care and culture are examined through this young man's lens, which also explore both his and family’s dreams. Many immigrants in the U.S. and their descendants aspire to realize the American dream and whether beholden to high self-imposed standards or assessed as falling short by social judgment, this Latino family aims for better. At the story’s genesis, it’s about a family’s migration from Puerto Rico in the 1950’s chasing the American dream. Now two generations later, who has attained the American dream?"

---

1. CORE -- Congress of Racial Equality

2. I Have A Dream

3.  Amazon Book Description: Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (King Legacy) by Martin Luther King Jr.

4. The King Center

5. Poetry Foundation

6. "After King accepted the pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, members of Ebenezer’s congregation attended his October 1954 installation service, prompting King to express his gratitude: ‘‘Your prayers and words of encouragement have meant a great deal to me in my ministry; and you can never know what your presence in such large numbers meant to me at the beginning of my pastorate. I want you to know Ebenezer, that I feel greatly indebted to you; and that whatever success I might achieve in my life’s work you will have helped to make it possible’’" King Research and Education Institute

7. nobelprize.org

He Plowed The Path to African-Americans US Citizenship

ASALH (The Association for the Study of African American Life and History) - the Founders of Black History Month, is a non-profit organization established on September 9, 1915 by Dr. Carter G. Woodson. The 2009 Black History Theme is “The Quest for Black Citizenship in the Americas”. In keeping with this years theme, I’d like to present Dred Scott:

Dred Scott (1799 – September 17, 1858), was a slave in the United States who sued unsuccessfully for his freedom in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford case of 1857. His case was based on the fact that he and his wife Harriet were slaves, but had lived in states and territories where slavery was illegal, including Illinois and Minnesota (which was then part of the Wisconsin Territory). The United States Supreme Court ruled seven to two against Scott, finding that neither he, nor any person of African ancestry, could claim citizenship in the United States, and that therefore Scott could not bring suit in federal court under diversity of citizenship rules. Moreover, Scott's temporary residence outside Missouri did not effect his emancipation under the Missouri Compromise, since reaching that result would deprive Scott's owner of his property. source Wikipedia

“Roswell M. Field was a prominent lawyer in St. Louis and also the father of journalist and poet Eugene Field”. “Field took few slave cases, but when he did, he represented slaves. Even then, however he had but limited experience with the law of slavery when he became Dred Scott's attorney. Scott had filed his freedom suit in the spring of 1846; six years later, after "bitterly fought" (p. 180) and complex litigation, and after the Missouri Supreme Court reversed itself on freedom suits, Field became Scott's attorney.” source Humanities & Social Sciences Online

“The Eugene Field House was the home of Eugene's father Roswell Field, the attorney who formulated the legal strategy that placed slave Dred Scott's lawsuit for freedom before the U. S. Supreme Court. In Scott v. Sandford, one of the most controversial cases of the 19th century, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that no slave could be a U.S. citizen and that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (that abolished slavery in most territories) was unconstitutional. The 1857 decision widened the political gap between the North and the South and helped precipitate the Civil War. A very outspoken critic of the decision was Abraham Lincoln, a relatively unknown Illinois lawyer, whose attacks on the case thrust him into the national political scene. Anger over Taney's decision energized the Republican party and led the nation's first antislavery political party to victory in 1860. It took the civil war and post-war constitutional amendments to overturn the Dred Scott decision.” source Eugene Field House and St. Louis Toy Museum


(source from Dred Scott Case Collection):"1858 Dred Scott dies of tuberculosis and is buried in St. Louis. He was buried in Wesleyan Cemetery at what is now the intersection of Grand and Laclede Avenues in St. Louis (now part of the campus of St. Louis University). In 1867, Wesleyan cemetery closed and the bodies were disinterred and re-buried at other sites. Dred Scott's body was moved to an unmarked grave in Section 1, Lot No. 177, Calvary Cemetery, in north St. Louis County. In 1957 a marker was placed on Dred Scott's grave which reads":

"DRED SCOTT BORN ABOUT 1799 DIED SEPT. 17, 1858 DRED SCOTT SUBJECT OF THE DECISION OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES IN 1857 WHICH DENIED CITIZENSHIP TO THE NEGRO, VOIDED THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE ACT, BECAME ONE OF THE EVENTS THAT RESULTED IN THE CIVIL WAR"



*The back of the tombstone says, "Freed from slavery by his Friend Taylor Blow."

“On its way to the United States Supreme Court, the Dred Scott case grew in scope and significance as slavery became the single most explosive issue in American politics. By the time the case reached the high court, it had come to have enormous political implications for the entire nation. On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney read the majority opinion of the Court, which stated that black people were not citizens of the United States and, therefore, could not expect any protection from the federal government or the courts; the opinion also stated that Congress had no authority to ban slavery from a federal territory. The decision of Scott v. Sandford, considered by legal scholars to be the worst ever rendered by the Supreme Court, was overturned by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution (1865-1868), which abolished slavery and declared all persons born in the United States to be citizens of the United States.” source National Archives and Records Administration

Excerpt from the poem “Freedom’s Plow” by Langston Hughes

(Complete poem American Poems)

BETTER DIE FREE,
THAN TO LIVE SLAVES.
Who said those things? Americans!
Who owns those words? America!
Who is America? You, me!
We are America!
To the enemy who would conquer us from without,
We say, NO!
To the enemy who would divide
And conquer us from within,
We say, NO!
FREEDOM!
BROTHERHOOD!
DEMOCRACY!
To all the enemies of these great words:
We say, NO!

A long time ago,
An enslaved people heading toward freedom
Made up a song:
Keep Your Hand On The Plow! Hold On!
The plow plowed a new furrow
Across the field of history.
Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.
From that seed a tree grew, is growing, will ever grow.
That tree is for everybody,
For all America, for all the world.
May its branches spread and shelter grow
Until all races and all peoples know its shade.
KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW! HOLD ON!

Please visit The Dred Scott Heritage Foundation