Martin Luther King’s dream, 60 years on

People gather to march in the annual parade down MLK Boulevard to honour Martin Luther King, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. REUTERS/Billy Weeks

What would Martin Luther King Jr make of America as it happens to be today? More precisely, how would he view the country where, 60 years ago on Aug 28, 1963, he dreamed of a landscape of equality for all Americans -- white and black -- a nation where his children would not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character?

The other day three black people were gunned down in Florida by a racist, who then turned the gun on himself. Some years ago, a policeman held a black man down, suffocating and killing him with his knee firmly planted on the man’s neck. In recent days, Fani Willis, District Attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, who has gone after Donald Trump and his friends for their efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state, has been the target of racist abuse for her work.

Such are the instances of racism as it persists in the United States today. Of course, these instances are not to be applied wholesale to white America, for America has changed in very significant ways since 1963 and indeed since Dr King was assassinated in April 1968. The civil rights leader, for that was what King was in a brief lifetime, would be quite happy with the changed America which is today home to people of all races and faiths and colour. And yet these isolated but gross acts of violence against blacks would deeply disturb him, for all the right reasons.

The Black Lives Matter movement remains a potent expression of black grievances in America today. And yet Dr King would be happy knowing that in America today there are no Negroes but only Afro-Americans. He would be glad knowing that Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young, black Americans who were his comrades in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, ascended to positions unimaginable in the asphyxiating America of his times. Jackson vied for the Democratic presidential nomination; and Young served as US ambassador to the United Nations in the Carter administration.

Martin Luther King Jr would be proud of the fact that Colin Powell made it to the very top of the US army before serving as Secretary of State. Condoleezza Rice, the young black schoolgirl who saw her friend die in a racist attack in a city called Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1960s, went on to be a respected academic and Secretary of State. And, yes, King would be thrilled to know that America crossed a threshold when Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father with roots in the Luo tribe, served two remarkable terms as President of the United States.

King’s dedication to the cause of equality for all men and women in America transformed America in the years following his murder by a white man. The road to a transformed, reinvented America commenced with that seminal oration in Washington in August 1963. The oratory lifted all Americans and with them people around the world to the heights of human grandeur, for on those heights were visible the very spirit of God as it walked the Earth. If Rosa Parks could light the flame of resistance through the Montgomery bus boycott in the 1950s, Dr King was the carrier of the flame in the long marathon that would end with President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

A devoted follower of Mahatma Gandhi, King adopted his spirit of non-violence that provokes a racist establishment into thoughtless action and then leaves that establishment exasperated and exhausted. Those who subject themselves, without violent or physical resistance, to the predatory assaults of bad men are those who triumph in the end. When truncheons and kicks and fists do not subjugate a people, for those people are waging a struggle on the basis of a cause with roots in faith, it is the men wielding those truncheons and resorting to those kicks and fists who end up tired and perspiring. Gandhi showed the way and King adopted it.

Sixty years ago, it was the firmness and legitimacy of a cause, powered by the engine of non-violence, by the need to have the enemy collapse from the exhaustion generated by violence decreed by the state, which was King’s message. Moral superiority underlay the cause; and honesty of purpose defined King’s politics. It was politics which would defeat arch-racists like Georgia’s Lester Maddox and put paid to the presidential ambitions of Alabama’s George Wallace.

King’s 1963 dream would work wonders in very many ways, and not just in politics. In movies, black actors would win accolades by their performance. Black writers would go on to earn acclaim for the magic of their words. In the media, African-American commentators and anchors have enriched political and social debate on contemporary issues.

In broad measure, King’s dream would translate into the dream of all nations across the continents. It would have Nelson Mandela fashion his Rainbow Nation in South Africa. America has Kamala Harris as Vice President; it has Vivek Ramaswamy campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination. It has black senators and congressmen. Black judges sit on the US Supreme Court.

America is not a land of perfection, yet. Neither is the world a planet of heavenly peace. But there has been -- and there will always be -- faith in the philosophical view Martin Luther King Jr took of the conditions humanity has been trapped in. ‘The arc of the moral universe,’ said King, ‘is long, but it bends toward justice.’

On 28 August 1963, King rang the bells for justice. Sixty years one, we celebrate that moment of biblical dimensions.

[Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and author. His most recent work is ‘Bangladesh: Political Odyssey of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’]