Martin Luther King’s dream lives on

Martin Luther King’s hopes became reality — for only some.

Martin Luther King Jr delivers his “I have a dream” speech to the crowd gathered at the Mall during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. Picture: Francis Miller/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

It is 50 years next Thursday since, as U2 wrote, “a shot rings out in the Memphis sky”, killing the father of America’s civil rights movement, Martin Luther King.

For John Morrison, the looming anniversary was enough to make him drive eight hours from his home in North Carolina to Selma, Alabama. There, the 44-year-old African-American took a quiet walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, scene of the Bloody Sunday clash between protesters and police in March 1965 that ignited King’s civil rights campaign.

“Given this is the 50th year of Dr King’s assassination, the story of Bloody Sunday means a lot to me and I just had to come see this place for myself,” he tells Inquirer as he walks across the bridge where 600 African-Americans were beaten, clubbed and gassed by state troopers as they protested peacefully for the right to register to vote. The incident, recounted in the Oscar-winning film Selma in 2014, persuaded congress to usher in the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing the right to vote for all African-Americans.

John Morrison: ‘Racism still exists. We have privileges and rights but we still have real challenges’.

“I think to myself how many things, good and bad, have happened to us in the 50 years since,” says Morrison, a radio show host from Fayetteville, North Carolina.

“On the one hand we have had a black president, we are able to go to any school or buy the houses or cars that we want, and we can do anything with our lives. But racism still exists and I wonder whether racism is at the heart of America. We have privileges and we have rights, but we still have real ­challenges.”

Across the US, the 50th anniversary of King’s death has caused African-Americans to take stock of how much has been won and lost since April 4, 1968, when white ­supremacist James Earl Ray fatally shot the 39-year-old King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

It’s a debate that has taken a sharper edge since the election of Donald Trump, who remains an unpopular president among many African-Americans despite their enjoying the lowest black unemployment rate in US history.

It says much about King’s legacy that older African-Americans remember the day of his death as clearly as whites do when president John F. Kennedy was shot.

“I remember there was pandemonium in our house when we heard Martin Luther King was killed,” says Hezekiah Jackson from Birmingham, Alabama, who was nine at the time.

“Like most people in our (African-American) community we had three portraits in the lounge room — Robert F. Kennedy, Jesus and Martin Luther King. My mother was usually very reserved but she was in tears on that day. She saw him as our spiritual leader and the only hope for people of colour in America.”

One of Jackson’s neighbours, John Alexander, was 18 at the time of King’s death, living in a dirt-poor Birmingham housing project.

“Everyone started crying when we heard about Martin Luther King,” he says. “We were so mad that we got rocks and started throwing them from the overpass down on to cars on the highway.”

Alexander says King’s death made him lose faith in the nonviolent resistance that King had preached, so he joined those who believed violence was the way to win freedom.

“After he died, our mind frame changed and we wanted to follow (civil rights leader) Malcolm X ­because he had no fear of his ­enemies, and then the Black Panthers came around and so we joined them,” says Alexander, who is now a local youth worker.

At the Lorraine Motel, King’s assassination remains frozen in time. The room where he was staying remains as it was on the day when he was killed while standing on the balcony outside. The motel and his room are now part of the US’s leading civil rights museum and will be the focal point of next week’s anniversary commemorations on April 4.

King’s niece, Alveda King, who was 16 at the time of her uncle’s death, recalls how her father — Martin Luther King’s brother ­Alfred Daniel King — was with him at the Lorraine Motel on the day he died.

“When I heard about his death I was very angry and hurt. I wanted to blame somebody,” she tells Inquirer. “I said: ‘Daddy why did these people kill my uncle?’ He said: ‘Don’t blame white people. White people marched with us, prayed with us.’ He said: ‘The devil killed your uncle, you have to forgive.’ ”

At the Lorraine Motel, King’s assassination remains frozen in time. The room where he was staying remains as it was on the day when he was killed. Picture: Joseph Louw/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images.

Alveda King grew up in the middle of the civil rights movement. When she was 12 her house was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham. “I remember daddy standing on the car outside our bombed house urging the crowd not to riot but to go home and pray,” says King, a religious minister who is the director of Civil Rights for the Unborn at Priests for Life in Atlanta, Georgia.

A year after Martin Luther King’s death, her father, also a civil rights activist, died under suspicious circumstances and was found floating in a pool with what she says were “bruises all over his body”. Fifty years on, Alveda King doesn’t accept a “black armband” view of history, which argues that African-Americans have made few gains since her uncle’s death. She is a Donald Trump voter and believes African-Americans have made important strides in the past 50 years and will continue to do so under Trump.

“I don’t know why he gets so little support (from African-Americans),” she says. “People are often misinformed and don’t take time to fully examine what we are experiencing. The jobs are growing, the unemployment rate is down.

“President Trump said: ‘I will bring the jobs back from overseas and will get Americans back to work’, and I believe that’s happening. Our people should say (of Trump), ‘If you can’t accept my personality, then accept what I’m doing.’ ”

So how have African-Americans fared in the 50 years since Martin Luther King’s death? In that tumultuous year of 1968 when King was killed and the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, the so-called Kerner Commission delivered a report to president Lyndon Johnson ­examining the cause of civil unrest in African-American communities. That report outlined in stark detail the economic and social inequities facing African-Americans and blamed “white racism” for “pervasive discrimination in ­employment, education and ­housing”.

To mark the 50th anniversary of that report, non-profit Washington think tank the Economic Policy Institute has ­released a report comparing the social and economic conditions for African-Americans today with those in 1968. Contrary to the overwhelmingly negative narrative put forward by some groups such as Black Lives Matter, the report found there has been comprehensive positive change in many aspects of life for African-Americans, although still not enough to bridge the equality gap with whites.

“We find both good news and bad news,” the report says. “While African-Americans are in many ways better off in absolute terms than they were in 1968, they are still disadvantaged in important ways relative to whites.”

The most profound positive change — beyond the obvious achievements of desegregation and full voting rights in the 1960s — is in education. When King died, just over half of African-Americans (54 per cent) completed high school compared with 75 per cent of whites. Today, 92 per cent of African-Americans graduate from high school, as do 96 per cent of whites. The proportion of African-Americans who get a bachelor’s degree or higher has risen to 23 per cent compared with 9 per cent in 1968. Whites have risen further in this time to 42 per cent from 16 per cent.

Rose Sanders laments that the bridge is still named after Edmund Pettus, who was a Confederate general and a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

Co-author Valerie Wilson says: “The important thing to understand about education is that it is undeniably important for economic mobility. At higher levels of education, African-Americans have lower unemployment rates and higher earnings than they would otherwise.’’

The report says “the substantial progress of educational attainment of African-Americans has been accompanied by significant absolute improvements in wages, incomes, wealth and health since 1968”.

The inflation-adjusted annual income of the typical African-American family has jumped 42 per cent since 1968 and the share of African-Americans living in poverty has fallen from 35 per cent to 21 per cent. But it says the gap between blacks and whites is far from filled.

“Black workers still make only 82.5c on every dollar earned by white workers. African-Americans are still 2½ times more likely to be in poverty as whites, and the median white family has almost 10 times as much wealth as the median black family,” the report says.

It also says black home ownership has remained almost static at just over 40 per cent since 1968. Meanwhile, the trend of mass incarceration in recent decades has had a disproportionate impact on African-Americans, whose incarceration rates have almost tripled since 1968.

The most encouraging news for African-Americans has been the rebound in the US economy and the steady fall in the unemployment rate for African-Americans, which dropped to a low of 6.8 per cent in December, the lowest figure since the government started keeping track in 1972.

This, however was still higher than the overall national unemployment rate of 4.2 per cent in that same month.

“This is not just a statistic — it is about changed lives,” says African-American political commentator Kathy Barnette. “Couple this with the tax cuts signed into law by President Trump that are designed to incentivise companies to invest in the US, create more American jobs and lift stagnant wages. All of this makes for a strong economy that is good for everyone. As one old saying goes, ‘you can’t have employees without employers’, and as another saying goes, ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’.”

But when Inquirer travels through African-American communities in the south, where King’s civil rights movement was fought and won, the mood is less positive. While many concede there have been some improvements, they also speak of ongoing economic inequality, of communities blighted by guns, violence and opioids, and of police brutality and police shootings.

Paulette Roby: ‘My teacher Miss Wesley’s daughter Cynthia was killed. I remember seeing her crying’.

Paulette Roby was 13 when she heard the bomb explode at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on September 15, 1963. That bomb, planted by the KKK, killed four African-American schoolgirls and galvanised the growing civil rights movement.

“We ran to the hospital and I remember seeing my teacher, Miss Wesley, who taught me in elementary school,” Roby says in an interview outside the church. “Her daughter Cynthia was killed. I remember seeing her crying and her husband was consoling her.

“Since those terrible times I see some good things but not enough,” she says. “These days we have black police, we have black farmers, we can attend college and we can walk into the front door of a restaurant when in those days we couldn’t. But apart from that, I see very little difference here in Birmingham. There is little economic improvement for blacks here. It feels like nothing has trickled down to us.”

In a cafe in Alabama’s sleepy capital of Montgomery, Karen Jones, an African-American, drinks a Dr Pepper and points out to window to the spot where Rosa Parks caught the bus in December in 1955. Parks’s refusal to give up her seat for a white person during that bus ride broke the city’s segregation rules, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott by African-Americans, the first mass protest of the civil rights movement.

“We all love and respect what Rosa did, but this city has still not moved with the times,” says Jones, a youth worker. “We have never had a black sheriff or a black probate judge, yet we are 60 per cent of the population. This city is still heavily racially divided. We have a mostly black high school named after (Confederate general) Robert E. Lee with a statue of him out the front. And in Washington we have a president who sends out a dog whistle to encourage this sort of institutionalised racism.”

Rose Sanders, an African-American lawyer, sits in the civil rights museum she founded at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and says she is dismayed by the state of this predominantly black town today.

Rose Sanders, lawyer: ‘White people remain in economic control around here’

“Selma is the most violent city in Alabama and the eighth most violent city of its size in the United States. Why is that? This small town draws the attention of the Obamas and the Clintons and ­famous people who come to Selma and walk that bridge, but then they go and they leave absolutely nothing here,” she says.

She laments that the bridge is still named after Edmund Pettus, who was a Confederate general and a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

“White people remain in economic control around here and a lot of black people have given up hope of work and the statistics don’t count them. It is as if they have lost sight of the civil rights ­movement.”

Sanders says Selma “gave America a dose of democracy it did not have” but adds: “America is still not a true democracy.”

Yet Selma, which became famous in 1965 for its struggle to allow black voters to register, delivered a potent demonstration of democracy only last December. The black vote from the Selma region played a key role in the upset win of Democrat Doug Jones over Trump’s Republican candidate Roy Moore in the state’s Senate special election.

Trump remains an unpopular president with most African-Americans. His reluctance to call out white supremacists for their part in the deadly protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year and his support for Confederate monuments have contributed to a ­belief among blacks that he is not in their camp.

Yet polls also show Trump’s support among African-Americans has increased since his election. Exit polls at the 2016 election show Trump claimed only 8 per cent of the black vote, but a CBS poll in January found African-American support for Trump had risen to 14 per cent.

A further 22 per cent said they might reconsider their support for him “if he does a good job”.

Conservative African-American commentator Shelby Steele says many African-Americans are struggling to come to grips with the improvements in their lives 50 years after King’s death.

“The recent protests by black players in the National Football League were rather sad for their fruitlessness,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal.

“They may point to the end of an era for black America and for the country generally — an era in which protest has been the primary means of black advancement in American life.

“From the Montgomery bus boycott to the march on Selma, from lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides to the 1963 March on Washington, only protest could open the way to freedom and the acknowledgment of full humanity.”

He says that through protest in the 1950s and 60s, “we, as a people, touched greatness”. But he says the NFL protests “missed a simple truth that is both obvious and unutterable — the oppression of black people is over with. This is politically incorrect news, but it is true nonetheless. We blacks today are a free people. It is as if freedom sneaked up and caught us by ­surprise.”

Steele says there is still racism in the US but says many African-Americans create a cult of victimisation “in the face of freedom’s unsparing judgmentalism”.

“We conjure elaborate narratives that give white racism new life in the present: ‘systemic’ and ‘structural’ racism, ‘white privilege’ and so on. All these narratives insist that blacks are still victims of racism and that freedom’s accountability is an injustice.”

Steele’s views are contested by many African-Americans who live in the heartland of King’s civil rights campaigns.

Frank Matthews: ‘What progress has there been in 50 years when another young black man is killed by police?’

Says Frank Matthews, a former gang member and one-time prison inmate: “Fifty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, you are standing here with me under the statue of Martin Luther King here in Birmingham.

“What progress has there been in 50 years when another young black man is killed by police or when they can’t get more than the minimum wage? Did you know that Birmingham doesn’t even have a school named after King? But they have one for Robert E. Lee and (Confederate general Stonewall) Jackson.”

The truth is, 50 years after King’s assassination, African-Amer­icans have taken enormous strides in social and economic free­doms. But it is impossible to travel through the US and be blind to the problems they still face.

“We have come a long way but there is still a longway to go,” says Morrison as he reaches the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

“That’s why its important to remind people of the struggle — of the 16th Street Baptist Church and the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They fought with Martin Luther King for what we have today and we must never forget that.”

Cameron Stewart is also US contributor for Sky News Australia.