Dr. King--I Hope We Still Have A Dream

photo by ehpien / flickr

I’ve been reading Michelle Obama’s book about her journey. It is called Becoming. And I recommend the book to everybody. She tells her story of growing up with her father and mother and brother in Southside Chicago. Her world was mostly black. Her parents never owned a house while she was growing up. They lived in the second story of her Aunt’s house. Hey father and mother took what jobs they could get—but were determined that their children would have a better chance than they had. 

Michelle takes us into the lives of black folk in the 1960’s. The amazing thing is that those reading discover that her family was just like us. Growing up I thought that maybe black people were just different and strange. I never thought that they had hopes and dreams like the rest of us. The only black folk I knew was the fine lady that kept us while my parents both worked named Nancy. My father got her a job in the mill where he worked—and after long hours there she would work for us part-time. She had five children, I think. And they lived in a tiny Alabama house where their grandparents took care of them while Nancy worked in Georgia and sent money back when she could. I don’t know what her dreams were but I do know she was loyal and loved us fiercely. When my Mother died she stood over the casket and cried and sat with our family for the service. 

photo  by Gage Skidmore / flickr

The only other black person I knew was named Shine. I never knew his full name. He worked in our barber shop around the corner shining shoes. My, my how he could make those shoes sparkle. We knew little about him except he was so proud of his wife who was a nurse. They had no children. He would even come by people’s houses, pick up their shoes and polish them and bring them back and set them on our porches. I never wondered about his life outside the barber shop. I do remember years later his wife left him for somebody else and that must have crushed him. I heard in his latter days that he started drinking heavily. But he worked hard. He loved us. He was faithful. And I don’t know how in the world he lived on those dimes and quarters we gave him for shining our shoes. 

My first real understanding of what black folks in Georgia were facing was the day I rode a city bus from downtown to my home. Mid-way there a black woman got on the bus and sat in a couple of seats back of me. Somebody told the bus driver that she was sitting “in our seats” and not the back of the bus. The bus driver looked back and told her to move. She just sat there. He said it a second time and as she sat people all over the bus murmured. So the bus driver stopped the bu and came back there furious. He said, “Nigger you can’t sit here—you gotta move back.” I was furious. And about 16 at the time. I turned around and said: “Well maybe if you would talk to her like she was a human being she might move.” Whew. Things got tense. She did move back and the bus went on it’s way. But that experience opened a door that I never knew existed. 

Nancy Fears and my daughter

Since then we have come a long, long way. But these last few years I’ve worried about the cruelty and mean-spirited I see almost everywhere. I don’t know where it came from. Maybe it has always been here just below the surface. Mr. Trump has not helped us move further down the road to liberty and equality to all.  

We still have a long way to go. But Michelle Obama’s book about her journey and her struggles is worth reading. There are a whole lot of folk out there—white and black and many-colored—who could do wonderful things if they just had a chance. And that’s our job in the church and in every part of society. 

The great King’s birthday today calls us back to being better people, kinder people knowing that we all are the same really. I think about black Nancy and Shine and that whole cadre who lived outside the wall of our lives. On our better days we have been told that here everybody has a chance. Everybody is the same. Not just "people like us."

Martin Luther King’s dream still is a challenge to us all:

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and there sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi a state of sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that may four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but buy the contents of their character.

I have a dream.”

Tell me people do we still have that dream?

photo of Selma by Christa Lohman /flickr


--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com