Dr. King’s legacy– We cannot afford to stop. We are too far from the mountain top
Even in our sleep pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our despair against our will comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. Aeschylus
On April 4, 2018, the nation of America marked 50 years since Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
On the day that King was assassinated he was in Memphis fighting for fair wages for the sanitation workers. Now fast forward 50 years later , in the same America where he was killed, and the same America where he openly voiced his dream for the world to hear, nothing much has happened.
We cannot hide society is still plagued by the racial divide. Blacks still continue to chase the dream. More than half of the African American workers earn below $15.00 per hour, and income equality has increased.Superimposed on this already troubling situation is the fact that today the white supremacists are boldly and with marked frequency espousing their views. Racism remains an omnipresent force deeply implicated in every aspect of Black lives.
Dr.King is not alive today as he would be shocked if not stunned at how little has changed in terms of Blacks encounters with the criminal justice system and law enforcement community.
MLK’s fight was never just about race or just about ending certain practices and racial entitlements.
Plainly put and factually stated. Dr. King’s was teaching us that racialism which unites us to much of reality , including the reality of our potential as individuals . It is deeply lamentable that 50 years after his death we still need leaders to remind us of this fact, and worse yet is the fact that none among our current crop of leaders seems capable of filling that role. So we cannot stop for we are still a way off from the mountain top.
Dr. King’ dream, or so it seems may soon be a nightmare. Attainment of his legacy still an illusion. His mountaintop still appears in sight but we won’ t get there without a fight.
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Change of this magnitude will not come easy. But all is not lost: A new light in rising across Africa where the 55 countries of the African Union still suffer from the maladies of colonialism. On March 21st in Kigali, Rwanda, 44 member states signed the agreement for the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
In his presentation at the ceremony, Moussa Faki Mahamat, Chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC) noted: “We have come here driven by the conviction that integration is not an option, but an imperative. To paraphrase Emperor Haile Selassie at the May 1963 Summit, the giant Africa cannot wake up if it remains divided…. Therefore, we are here to fulfil the aspiration of our peoples for integration and unity….We have come here to lay a new milestone, to take another step in the Pan-African journey, whose intellectual seeds were sown more than a century ago.”
Much work remains to be done as each nation must ratify the agreement before its implementation. Learn more:
au.int/en/pressreleases/20180321/au-member-countries-create-history-massively-signing-afcfta-agreement-kigali
Times are a-changing. The battle is not lost.