Reaching for the skies: I have a dream 50 years on

WHEN I was six, I was in a children’s gospel choir. Most of the songs we sang were standards such as ‘Jesus Loves the Little Children’ or ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’ — not complicated stuff to understand.

But there was one song that we sang that was always a head scratcher for me. This was one of those “walking songs”, the ones you march into the sanctuary to. The words were easy enough, a simple refrain repeated over and over: “We’re marching, to Zion, beautiful, beautiful Zion/We’re marching upward to Zion, the beautiful city of God.”

The first few times we sang this song, I just repeated the lines as requested and tried not to trip over my robe. But after a few weeks, the tune really started bothering me. First, I thought to myself, who is this guy “Zion” who lives in God’s city? Or, if Zion’s a place, how come we never get there? Sunday after Sunday, week after week, month after month, we were always... marching. But for some reason, we never, ever arrived.

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, the same feeling gnaw at me. For weeks, I’ve been reflecting on the extraordinary legacy of the organisers of the original march 50 years ago, people such as A Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, James Farmer, Roy Wilkins, John Lewis, and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr.

I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about Zion. Not the heavenly Zion, but the earthly one — the terminus of our marches, the place where we’re supposed to eventually arrive. I couldn’t help but ask myself the same question that stumped me as a child: Where is this place we’re heading, and when, dear God, will we get there?

My first instinct has always been to answer that open-ended inquiry with an equally squishy response, one that we will hear again and again from politicians, preachers, and activists during the celebrations: “We’ve come so far, but we have so much further to go.” I’ve said this line myself, even did so recently in the pulpit of a Black Baptist church.

It’s a phrase that sounds practical, realistic, and even useful. But the problem is: I think it’s wrong. And more than just wrong, it is perhaps the primary barrier to real racial progress in this nation.

You see, I believe King meant what he said: I think he meant for his dreams to actually be realised, and not in some distant future Zion. When he declared that his hope was for “even the state of Mississippi” to be “transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice”, I think he meant that Mississippi should get its act together, not hundreds of years from now but right then and there.

When he said “one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers”, the “one day” he was referring to was not the day of his future grandchildren’s grandchildren, but the time of his own children and their kids.

When Rustin and Randolph had the original idea for a March on Washington, their goal was not to create a culture of perpetual marches. No, the goal was a focused one: At first, they wanted an executive order banning discrimination in military contracting, which they got. Later, they wanted a civil rights act and a voting rights act, which they also got.

And just a day before he died, when King said: “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,” he was not posing some abstract, fatalistic vision that he did not intend for our country to realise. No, he was referring to the biblical relationship between Moses and Joshua, and bestowing that legacy on us. We have to remember: Moses took his people almost to their destiny and stopped right short, but Joshua actually walked them in.

Instead of being in a state of perpetual struggle, an endless existential march, I believe there is far more evidence to support the idea that we are right on the verge of Zion. And the only thing that will stop us from getting there is the hopeless belief that we can’t.

For example, in the early 1970s, following the major accomplishments of the civil rights movement, 28% of black men dropped out of secondary school. Today that number is around 14%. For whites, it’s 12%. So we don’t have “so much further to go” — we have 2% to go. Tough, but doable.

Four decades ago, the life expectancy for African-Americans was 66 years old. Today, it is 72. For whites, it’s 77. We don’t have many hills left to climb — we have to close the gap by five years of life, we’ve done six. Difficult, but possible.

ONE major area where America has actually fallen woefully behind is in the percentage of young black men who are incarcerated, shooting up from 2% in the 1970s to 5% today, while the percentage of whites in jail grew by less than 1% in that same period. US attorney general Eric Holder recently documented some of the reasons for this phenomenon, but also proposed some practical solutions. This is a problem that can actually be fixed.

The fact is, Americans don’t need to go “much further”. They just need to walk two miles from the Lincoln Memorial to Southeast Washington and make sure that the young men and women in school in Anacostia can fill out their applications for student aid, go to college, and not have Congress cut their grants.

They need to march to North Carolina and ensure its state legislature doesn’t disenfranchise a generation of young people, poor people, and minorities, and to Florida and other states to demand that their legislatures do something about discriminatory laws. We just need to walk to communities where fathers are not around and help them reconnect to their families, like the Center for Urban Families is doing, and work with employers to provide good-paying jobs and a second chance for ex-offenders.

These goals are imminently achievable, and organisations and activists around the country — from the Dream Defenders to the Campaign for Black Male Achievement — are helping us walk the last mile. They are not on some perpetual march to Zion. They’re focused on achieving dignity and self-determination for every struggling person in this country.

On this 50th anniversary, we should march knowing that we certainly have not yet fulfilled Dr King’s dream. We haven’t yet yielded the fruit of our promised land and tasted its full measure of milk and honey. But what if instead of seeing this land as thousands of miles off in the distance, we perceived it as being right in front of us, begging us to walk toward it, and enter.

Hey, maybe we’re even standing on it right now — and all we need to do is bend down and till the soil.

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