“I have a dream.
It is a dream deeply rooted in the American
dream.
I have a dream…”
“I have a dream that
one day, this nation will rise up…
live out the true meaning of it’s creed…
We hold these truths
to be self-evident. That all men are created equal.”
I just got back home today. I spent the past few days in
Alabama, “Sweet Home Alabama”. I had decided I had to go home again when the Equal
Justice Initiative opened the National Memorial for Peace and Justice,
and the Legacy Museum, both in downtown Montgomery.
I flew into Birmingham and checked into a hotel there. My
first full day would be spent in Selma. One-hundred-degree weather, Brown Chapel AME Church, the Visitor’s Center, the Interpretive Museum, the Alabama River, and the Bridge. I had to walk across that bridge.
They started their march six blocks away, at Brown Chapel AME Church. I would do the
same. When I got to the crest of the bridge and looked down to the other side,
I tried to visualize what they saw. In my mind’s eye I could see the
militarized force of State Troopers and deputized klansmen waiting in formation
at the foot of the bridge. I imagined the weapons they brandished; nightsticks,
brass knuckles, guns. I thought about how intimidating the troopers on
horseback must have been, waiting menacingly in the rear of the formation as if
they were Jeb Stuart’s Cavalry during the glory days of Lee’s Army of Northern
Virginia.
When I got to the bottom of the bridge, I tried to imagine
what must have gone through the minds of the marchers when the troopers donned
their gas masks, the cavalry started to advance, and the troopers began their
advance to break up the march.
The African-Americans wanted to vote. The white people did not want
them to vote. The result was Bloody Sunday.
On my second day in Alabama I drove from Birmingham to
Montgomery. I drove down Dexter Avenue
and parked my rental car in front of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. This
was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church, and ironically, perhaps even
poetically, it is literally adjacent to the Alabama State Capitol. Jefferson Davis took the oath of office to be the first and only President of the Confederacy on it’s
steps. On the building’s portico, George Wallace declared “segregation today, segregation
tomorrow, segregation forever!”. However, less than a block away,
within plain view of that building, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and by
extension, the Civil Rights Movement
was born and nurtured at Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church.
In the Spring of 1965, the March from Selma to Montgomery
would conclude on Dexter Avenue. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would
stand on those same Capitol steps and make one of his most memorable speeches
to the massive throng of people that stretched the length of the avenue. During that
speech King reminded the marchers and the nation that “the arc of the moral universe is
long, but it bends toward justice.”
Because of the blood and courage of the people of Alabama,
the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson on August 6, 1965.
But, I didn’t stop there.
The National Memorial for Peace and Justice
is located high on a hill overlooking the city of Montgomery. That is appropriate.
It is the first comprehensive memorial dedicated to the memory of thousands of
African Americans that were lynched in the most violent, despicable, ways
imaginable. The purpose of this widespread and culturally sanctioned terror was
to enforce the proposition that all men were NOT created equal, and that Black
people had no rights that whites were bound to respect. This state of mind is
what made it suicidal for a Black person to try to vote.
That is the essence of the courage displayed by the people
that marched across that bridge. They put their lives on the line. They risked
being lynched, to make it possible for everybody to vote.
Every single person memorialized at the National Memorial for Peace and
Justice is a martyr for justice. They should be lifted up, high above the city that epitomized the evils of
slavery, bigotry, and racism. It seems so right that the thousands of names memorialized
there, with the date and places of their victimhood in plain sight, can now
look down on the Alabama River and the former slave markets from a higher
place.
Once again, I am reassured that unearned suffering, is
redemptive.
But, I didn’t stop there.
I drove down the hill to Coosa Street and the Legacy
Museum. It’s located on the site of a warehouse where Blacks were
imprisoned in preparation of being sold. It’s about half-way between the old
slave market and the main dock on the Alabama
River. Montgomery was the capital of the slave-trade in Alabama, and Alabama
had more slaves than any other state except one.
I was thinking of all these things as I drove back to my
hotel in Birmingham. I thought of our current President. I thought of his
problems, issues, and inadequacies. I thought of the Republican Party, and
their total submission to the madness that has engulfed our nation. During my
drive I realized ever so clearly that the answer to all that ails us is simple.
The answer is to vote. That is how the system is designed. That
is the power of “we the people”.
The people in Selma knew that in 1965. That is why they
risked their lives on that bridge.
The key is the young people, the millennials,
the gen-x’ers,
the kids that are just graduating from high school. If they decide that it's cool to vote, if they decide that they're tired of waiting for the world to change, they could turn the government upside down.
Here’s the deal. Imagine that the Democrats win the House
of Representatives. Imagine that the Democrats win the Senate.
Imagine Pence is indicted, and Trump is impeached after Mueller
names him as an un-indicted co-conspirator and lays out a devastating case of money
laundering, bank fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy against the United States.
Imagine the officers of the NRA and Republican cabinet members and congressmen are indicted as well.
The Speaker of the house would be a Democrat. With Pence and
Trump gone, The Speaker would become President.
At that point, our current nightmare would be
over.
Can’t happen, you say?
Registered
Republicans are only 28% of the American population. The young people in
America hate Trump and everything he stands for. But, they don’t vote! If they
did, we could elect a Democrat senator in Alabama…. Oh wait! We did that!
Nothing is more important in a democracy than the vote.
Young people changed the world in the sixties. Young people can change our
world in November.
