The first two of the final four sentences in Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech on the evening before his assassination in Memphis were “…. I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.”
Notwithstanding individuals seeking to erase racial progress since World War II — after which advocacy of a master race was as winsome as an invitation to play Russian Roulette — desire for a more perfect union cannot be reversed. Efforts to reinstitute slavery by other means after Reconstruction ultimately failed. Efforts to emulate servitude and segregation, compromising Civil Rights Movement advances, shall no more succeed.
Anne Frank addressed the thought on Saturday July 15, 1944, in arguably her diary’s most famous lines, “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
Rock and Roll lyrics are parallel: “People Got to Be Free” by The Rascals (1968) counsels,
“All the world over, so easy to see
People everywhere just wanna be free
Listen, please listen, that's the way it should be
There’s peace in the valley, people got to be free.”
Subjugating people of color requires forgetting Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others. To accomplish what the heirs of the Ku Klux Klan and Citizens Councils desire requires an amount of selective memory that the human mind cannot comprehend — that cognitive dissonance cannot deliver.
It is delusional behavior to believe that decades of progress can be eliminated — relegated to the ash heap of history.
Perhaps life appears easier for those indulging in contemporary variations on a theme of Jim Crow, given Mississippi’s past. Yet who can live with oneself ignoring every last thing taught about American democracy in civics classes and about human decency, ethics and morality in religious school and while listening to Bible readings and sermons during services?
There are times to control impulses and times to heed one’s inner voice and moral compass. Both impulse control and ethical dictates are ignored buying into white supremacy redux.
Eugenics are particularly odious in the state having the largest percentage African American population in the country. Historical anachronism demands turning blind eyes to a significant portion of our compatriots. It depreciates worthwhile visual arts, musical forms, literary works, culinary genius — you name it. Life is impoverished, diminished, disparaging the contributions of people of color to the world around us.
Not just that: Many African Americans are exceptionally joyful and warm. Why insulate oneself from lovely individuals, regarding them as inferior and undeserving of one’s time and attention?
Nonetheless there are those — wanting to have their cake and eat it too — insisting that they recognize racial equality while promoting public policy undermining the achievements of Civil Rights Movement legends. Naysayers might win a few battles, but they shall never win a war on liberty and justice for all. History highlights trends over the centuries: Efforts to reinstate attitudes prevalent when Europeans colonized the globe, oppressing dissimilar individuals, will hardly win friends and influence people.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
