The Dream Was Delayed But It’s Still The Vision

Sixty years ago, thousands of people in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. heard for the first time Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It’s hard to see whether we would have been further along in achieving that dream if President John F. Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated a few months later. But the dream persists. The dream that a more just America emerges and lives up to its creed of “liberty and justice for all,” persists.

I was only 12 years old during that summer, but the forces of history would repeatedly invade my innocence over the following years and forever change my perspective. First, there was the assassination of JFK; then the Watts riots; the nightly TV news reporting on the carnage of the Vietnam War; the protests and more assassinations of national figures including King five years after the speech and Robert Kennedy two months later on the night of his Democratic primary victory in Los Angeles. I was in Washington D.C. on the night King was killed and the outrage and sadness were both sudden and stunning. Did this mean that the dream had died with the prophet or was it such a strong vision, that it lived on without him?

In those days it was not so certain that any kind of real change would occur even when the Voting Rights Act was signed into law. For those of you who grew up in Los Angeles during this time, you will recognize what’s documented in the book Set the Night on Fire–LA in the Sixties by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener. However, for those who came of age later, this book will be a real eye-opener for you. Not all of my friends living in the white suburbs from this era understood what was going on, but they were still connected to the TV. Many of my graduating class avoided serving in ‘Nam by getting student deferments, while others fled to Canada. But after college, many of them retreated behind the Orange Curtain, or even further away, only to discover that as America changed over the generations so did the demographics and the politics.

There are still enclaves of mostly white conservatives in the rural reaches of California ― places like San Bernardino and Riverside counties and beyond but they are growing fewer. The once-strong California Republican Party is now down to only 24% of registered voters, just behind independent voters. And here in the great metropolis on the desert by the sea, even the once lily-white areas of Palos Verdes and Long Beach have had to accept change with the outlawing of racial covenant restrictions on real estate purchases during the ’60s. And yet still there are young millennials and others who don’t understand what came before and how they are the beneficiaries of the social advancement of the last six decades. It really makes me wonder about what history is being taught in our schools.

Do the Southern California schools even know what to teach about white supremacy and racism in this state, or that the Ku Klux Klan once marched down 12th street in San Pedro during the 1920s to attack and destroy the Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW Union Hall? It’s a past that has been conveniently buried but not completely forgotten by some who are often admonished about disturbing the past like waking the ghosts of old Beacon Street. Los Angeles has made a cultural artform out of destroying its past and burying it to reinvent the “New” and San Pedro has always struggled to do the same but lags behind.

Still, in America, “the land of the free,” we are once again engaged in a struggle with a part of ourselves over exactly what those words mean and for whom they apply. Do the laws apply to both the rich and the poor equally, or does a grifter like the ex-president get away with 91 felonies unscathed? Unexpectedly we are now confronted with either believing in “the Dream” of a more fair and equitable nation or allowing for some autocrat to take over our democracy and drive the U.S. Constitution into the ditch.

While the MLK Dream speech is regularly misquoted by the right, the full meaning of that march was about “jobs and freedom” something which is not lost on the growing number of labor unions across Los Angeles and the nation protesting wages, working conditions, automation, AI and robotic replacement of workers today. Today’s labor movement looks so much more like the Dream.

As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even the past.” It seems that the labor and freedom rights issues have been resurrected in the present with as much vitality as they once were in the past. Perhaps the new autocracy has galvanized and rekindled the solidarity that was once so critical to building a stable middle class and a more equal democracy. And now in this generation, it’s finally time to accomplish that dream!