Forty-nine years later, Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'Dream' not quite realized: Morgan

on August 29, 2012 at 10:57 PM, updated August 29, 2012 at 11:00 PM
march-on-washington.jpgCivil rights demonstrators gather between the Washington Monument, left, and the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963, at the conclusion of a march on the capital led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Forty-nine years ago yesterday, more than 200,000 people of various ethnicities convened at the Lincoln Memorial in the nation's capital to hear the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his now immortal "I Have a Dream" speech.

The event was pegged as the "March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom," and it helped deliver some of the elements of change King pushed for in his moving speech.

History records that the march and the events surrounding it directly led to Congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Who would have believed just 45 years after that speech the United States would elect its first African-American president? Given the intransigence of power structures in the South and the soft-core bigotry pervasive in the rest of the nation, that was a turn of events many contemplated but few thought they would live to see.

This nation's boundless capacity for change and growth is a marvelous thing.

Now, blacks, Hispanics, Asians and women occupy positions of authority and popularity in the media, government, politics and business.

Children of a certain age take it for granted that persons of color and women can be in charge of things and have only a vague awareness of the battles waged just a few scant decades ago to make it all happen.

Much has changed since that bright sunny day in August of 1963, and, yet, even as the nation becomes more inclusive, there are those who are not comfortable with all this change.

A portion of the electorate seems to want to march backward. They seem to want to reconfigure the 15th Amendment, which guarantees the right of all citizens to vote -- a right that "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude."

Now, 49 years after the March on Washington, states under the sway of the party of Lincoln are conniving to keep thousands of people from casting their ballots. And a sizable number of the country's citizenry clings to a belief that President Barack Obama is not a real American but a foreign usurper of sorts who gained access to the White House by subterfuge. Some possessing this frame of mind have difficulty believing the nation legitimately elected a black man its president and commander-in-chief.

This, of course doesn't pertain to everyone who opposes Obama.

There are many, including some blacks, who just see Obama's policies as leading to further unemployment and increasing debt.

And yet there is something rarely uttered that bespeaks a racial undertone in this election. There is no doubt that this is not the America of the March on Washington. Much has changed and should be celebrated, but there is still a ways to go.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Earl Morgan's column appears here every Wednesday.