Appiah Kusi Adomako
21 August 2008
column
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. Rev Martin Luther King Jr Next Thursday, 28th August, 2008 marks the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's famous speech titled I Have A Dream, which was delivered in Washington DC at the Lincoln Memorial on that sweltering summer day. This speech has been hailed by experts as the best speech of the twentieth century.
It was at time that the issue of racial segregation and discrimination against black people in the USA was brought to the doorstep of Washington DC power brokers.
If there is any particular race which has suffered in this world then it is the black race and the Jewish. From the period of
colonisation, the slave trade, discrimination and segregation, blacks have been subjected to all sorts of injustice. When the US Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the black person was sixty percent of a person. About fifty years ago another curious formula seems to declare he was fifty percent of a person. Negros, as black people were called in America, were considered second class citizens.
Blacks and whites could not use the same facility. Public places had separate entrances for blacks and whites. In the state of Alabama, blacks were designated to sit only at the back seats of the public buses. Even when all the seats inside a bus were full, a black person ought, under the state ordinance, to relinquish his or her seat to any white person who comes on board. A seamstress by the name of Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. She got arrested and prosecuted. Blacks in Montgomery decided to boycott the public buses
. It was during that crisis that a young minister of gospel called Rev Martin Luther King Jr emerged as the leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA). For about one year, the blacks in the city 'felt honourable to walk to work with pride than to ride in the city buses with humiliation'.
They took the city of Montgomery to court and the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public buses was unconstitutional and violated the US Constitution.
Churches also became partakers of the evils of segregations. There were black churches and white churches. Eleven o'clock on Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in American life. In the area of employment, housing and education there was segregation and discrimination. The bank of justice became bankrupt for blacks in the USA as the series of unsolved killings and bombings against black people in the USA continued unabated.
The decade of change in the USA, as Taylor Branch wrote in his book PARTING THE WATERS: AMERICA IN KING YEARS, said the social changes that America has seen started in the 1960's through the work of Martin Luther King Jr and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).
When King delivered his famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, he sought to bring the issue of injustice, segregation and discrimination to the conscience of the state. Soon after the speech, President John F. Kennedy met the leaders of the March at the White House.
Earlier that summer, when the field secretary of the NAACP, Medger Evers, was shot dead in the state of Mississippi; President Kennedy gave his Civil Rights address to the nation and asked Congress to act with the fierce urgency of now in protecting the civil liberties of all Americas.
Civil Rights issues dominated the pages of the American press and even played a part in who won the 1960 presidential election. The Civil Rights Bill was sent to Congress but just before the bill was passed President Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Vice President Lyndon B Johnson, who succeeded JFK, in his inaugural address pledged to continue the Civil Rights Bill that JFK wanted to have passed. The Bill was passed and later the Voting Act was also passed, which eliminated all the artificial boundaries that had been put in place to prevent black voters exercising their franchise.
A lot has happened over the last four and half decades. School doors, which were closed to black people, could not survive under the surging pressures of non-violent protest by Dr King and his organization. James Meredith entered the University of Mississippi on court orders after the US Supreme Court had ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.
Some decades ago, not a single black person entered Congress, except as a porter or a chauffeur. But things are different now. In assault after assault, led by Dr King and the SCLC the sagging walls of segregation came tumbling down. During this era the entire edifice of segregation was profoundly shaken. Fifty years ago, blacks seemed almost invisible to the larger society, and the facts of their harsh lives were unknown to the majority of the nation. But today things have changed in America.
America is hailed as the land of opportunity. When Martin Luther King Jr said that 'I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character' he was not day-dreaming.
When Dr King said that 'I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood', he was not speaking about a period of time beyond the reach of mankind. It has taken less than half a century to see Americans selecting Barack Obama as the Democratic Party nomination for the 2008 election based on the content of character and not the colour of his skin.
With all opinion polls putting him ahead of Senator John McCain, he is likely going to be elected as the next president of the USA.
Obama himself told delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 that his story is only possible in America.
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