Insufficient funds still
Thousands gather today at the Lincoln Memorial for the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington. There in 1963 Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech to more than 200,000 there to demand America make good on its promise. Today, King’s granite statue stands nearby as another memorial to consequential figures in American history.
The civil rights movement, its speeches and marches, the white violence against protesters’ demands for Black equality, led after the assasination of President Kennedy later that year to passage of the transformational Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts under his successor, Lyndon Johnson. Decades of backlash to that cultural transformation today threaten that still-unfulfilled dream (Washington Post):
In the wake of court rulings, legislation and political extremism that organizers say has undone or stymied crucial racial and social progress, the rally’s leaders say they plan not a commemoration, but a reassertion of the demands made at the Memorial in 1963.
“It feels like we’ve gone backwards,” King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, said before the rally.
“Dad talked about eradicating the triple evils of poverty, racism and violence. … Just about any problem that we are faced with in our nation falls under one of those categories,” he said.
“Over the past two years when we are literally witnessing oppression being legislated, when we have witnessed the physical attack on democracy with an insurrection, I believe it is more critical than ever to have some type of optimism,” said his wife Arndrea Waters King. “We all have a role in realizing the dream.”
Organizers of this year’s commemoration hope to recapture the energy of the original March on Washington – especially in the face of eroded voting rights nationwide, after the recent striking down of affirmative action in college admissions and abortion rights by the Supreme Court, and amid growing threats of political violence and hatred against people of color, Jews and the LGBTQ community.
Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and civil rights leader, tells AP, “We take two steps forward, and they make us take one step back.”
King said during his famous speech:
In a sense we have come to our Nation’s Capital to cash a check. When the architects of our great republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given its colored people a bad check, a check that has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
King’s promised land remains an unfulfilled promise. And it will so long as some believe, as Heather McGhee said, “that progress for people of color has to come at white people’s expense.”