Apr 05 2009
Dr. King would be nauseous
Forty-one years ago came the news African-Americans had feared for more than a decade. The lives of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the modern Civil Rights Movement as we’d known it, had ended.
History blamed James Earl Ray for killing Dr. King, but the last generation of slave-descended “colored people” killed The Movement.
That postwar “Baby Boom” generation - my generation - started school before the movement changed its name, and had already been inspired up North by Minister Malcolm before Rev. King did the same down South. As teenagers, a Black Liberation Movement in the U.S. had transformed us from Negroes to proud people of African descent, and while grateful that Martin lived long enough to deliver his “Dream Speech,” we’d been prepared for his murder three years before it happened, by the assassination of Malcolm.
On April fourth, forty-one years ago, with the oldest of our generation just two months from college graduation, Doc was taken from us. The fate of our people would soon be entrusted to African-American children whose bright futures had been purchased with the blood, sweat and tears of courageous Negroes who loved us enough to sacrifice all.
However, as Kwame Ture, the young lion of that generation known then as Stokely Carmichael, once pointed out: “all movement is not progress.”
We proceeded to make some fatal tradeoffs: our minority’s greater good for the majority’s values, ideals for materialism, education for entertainment, neighborhood peace for unspeakable violence. A few tried to move us forward while most allowed our communities to implode, now all comprise the generation that would have made the difference, but didn’t.
Today, the condition of our people would disgust Dr. King, who might call what black baby boomers did with The Movement any number of things…but not Progress.
