Dr King’s Dream Deferred – Does it Explode?

Andy Heaslet
1/15/10

My roommate, Michael, and I were headed to meet some friends in North St Louis and found ourselves driving along about five miles of Martin Luther King Dr. The story in St Louis is the same as most cities in the country, the streets named for this visionary leader run through the parts of our communities that most vividly illustrate how far away we are from realizing his many dreams.

If buildings were standing, they were boarded up, paint chipping off of signs painted decades ago. Businesses that were operational were liquor stores, gas stations with bullet-proof glass, and fast food restaurants. The few people brave enough to travel on foot through this urban wasteland wore worn thrift clothes and were, exclusively, of course, black.

Michael and I started the drive innocently enough, we’ve been there before, we know Chris Rock’s comedy and the unfortunate humor in the joke, but it didn’t take long for our spirits to dim on this short journey. Virtually the entire North Side of our city is in dire straights, but Dr King’s Drive is particularly depressing.

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Forty-Seven Years ago, in what may be Dr King’s most notorious speech, he spoke about why he fought for what he did:

In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our 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 "unalienable 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 the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm

Unfortunately, instead of fulfilling the promise of our land, as demanded by Dr King and the thousands who gathered with him that day, our municipal governments simply gave black communities new streets signs. They continue to ignore the demands of King and continue to cater to malls, bars, corporations, sports teams, and individual (usually white) interests.

The Federal Government gave us a holiday and somewhat improved civil rights, but, like their municipal counterparts, this changed the printing of calendars more than it changed the communities in which we live. The dream remains unfulfilled and the check still comes back bad.

Four years after Dr King’s “Dream” speech, he shared a deeper analysis of the accounting that led to that bad check in his “Beyond Vietnam, a Time to Break the Silence” speech at the Riverside Church in New York’s Upper West Side:

I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.”
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm

We now have open adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan and jokingly occult, or secretive, wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia and spend almost as much on militarism as the rest of the world combined. Somehow, year after year, we continue to find money to fund wars and weapons, but we can’t muster the funds or courage to fight poverty and racism.

And that’s the way it goes. The legend of the man the FBI once called “The most dangerous man in America,” has been co-opted by our government. So we get street signs but we don’t get the streets. We get the day but we don’t get the dream.

But Langston Hughes asked us:

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up 
like a raisin in the sun? 
Or fester like a sore-- 
And then run? ”Does it stink like rotten meat? 
Or crust and sugar over-- 
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags 
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Our political and governmental leaders have given us raisins, runny, festering sores, rotten meat, crusty sweets, and sagging loads and named them after a man who dreamt of so much more. His dreams have been deferred far too long and we needn’t neglect them any longer. These dreams, King’s dreams, our dreams: they explode. They explode!

I look forward to igniting dream fireworks with you in 2010.

Andy Heaslet is the Coordinator of the St Louis based Peace Economy Project.