So what has happened since then? Let’s see. Well, other than more folks like me on television and in movies — albeit still in the roles of tricksters and clowns — fewer African American farmers, lower literacy rates, easier access to guns, credit cards and strip malls (and clubs), I would suggest very little. This strikes me as strange for, although I can see some movement toward his vision, it seems that, with each progressive step forward, we are either kicked back or, even worse, kicking ourselves back three or four more steps.
Yes, we have seen four or five presidential candidacies from the likes of Jackson, Chisholm and, recently, Obama. But, outside of that, I can’t place my hand on any one tangible accomplishment other than the vote, which my granny said they didn’t die and bleed in the streets for. In her words, “It was justice and liberty.” She, as did the men in my family, always told me that, if you have to ask for freedom, then one must question if they are actually free.
I mean, never was the divisiveness so clear as when I accidentally ran across the forum annually held by Tavis Smiley last week. Dr. Cornel West and another member of the panel ripped him apart for less than petty reasons — one being that he had the audacity to announce his candidacy on the same weekend of the forum. They even had a problem with him announcing his candidacy in Springfield, Ill., birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. Never mind that it makes good sense, being that President Obama is the former U.S. senator from the state of Illinois, and the state’s capital is Springfield.
I guess folks like West, Smiley and even BET founder Robert L. Johnson feel that Obama has to kiss and wipe their a–es for permission, or worse, that he ain’t black enough to represent black folks in America, especially given his perspective regarding where Obama’s loot is coming from and talking about “white” folks’ and “Jewish” folks’ money and all.
To me, it shows that Obama is able to gather support from all folks not to mention that the astute scholar West, whom I met personally while in Ethiopia during an AIDS conference, doesn’t seem to recall that the legal and tender notes we call “dollars” are green and have no religious affiliation.
West himself, when invited to Chicago by Rev. Michael Pfleger to speak at his St. Sabina mass, said, “We have been living for 40 years in a political, moral and spiritual ice age.”
Like I said, it’s been 43 years since that day an assassin murdered one of my idols — one of the men who, regardless of his color, spawned my mind to think freely and critically. And what has happened since then? I would suggest little, but now, unfortunately, we enslave ourselves. It took Moses 40 years to lead his people to freedom. So, maybe now is really our time. –torrance stephens, ph.d.
