Is MLK dream reality? In changed city, yes and no
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| A
young protester confronted by a police officer and a snarling police dog
is depicted in a sculpture in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Ala. on
Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2013. As the nation marks the 50th anniversary of the
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, there may be no
better place than Birmingham to measure the progress that followed the
civil rights leader's historic call for racial and economic equality |
BIRMINGHAM, Ala.
(AP) -- When he boarded a Greyhound bus on his way to Princeton
University, Glennon Threatt promised himself he'd never come back here.
As a young black man, he saw no chance to fulfill his dreams in a city
burdened by the ghosts of its segregated past.
Helen
Shores Lee left Birmingham years earlier, making the same pledge not to
return. A daughter of a prominent civil rights lawyer, she wanted to
escape a city tarnished by Jim Crow laws - the "white" and "colored"
fountains, the segregated bus seating, the daily indignities she
rebelled against as a child.
Both changed
their minds. They returned from their self-imposed exile and built
successful careers - he as an assistant federal public defender, she as a
judge - in a Birmingham transformed by a revolution a half century ago.
This
week, as the nation marks the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, there may be no better place
than Birmingham to measure the progress that followed the civil rights
leader's historic call for racial and economic equality.
This
city, after all, is hallowed ground in civil rights history. It was
here where children marching for equal rights were jailed, where
protesters were attacked by snarling police dogs and battered by
high-pressure fire hoses. And it was here where four little girls in
their Sunday finest were killed when dynamite planted by Ku Klux Klan
members ripped through their church in an unspeakable act of evil.
That
was the Birmingham of the past. The city that King condemned for its
"ugly record of brutality." The city where he wrote his impassioned
"Letter from a Birmingham Jail," declaring the "moral responsibility to
disobey unjust laws." The city where the movement came together, found
its voice and set the stage for landmark civil rights legislation.
The
Birmingham of the present is a far different place. The airport is
named after a fearless civil rights champion, the late Rev. Fred
Shuttlesworth. The city's website features a `Fifty Years Forward'
campaign, forthrightly displaying photos of shameful events in 1963.
There are black judges and professors in places where segregation once
reigned. And black mayors have occupied City Hall since 1979, in part
because many white residents migrated to the suburbs, a familiar pattern
in urban America.
So has King's dream of equality been realized here and has Birmingham moved beyond its troubled past?
For
many, the answer is yes, the city has changed in ways that once seemed
unthinkable - and yet, there's also a sense Birmingham still has a long
way to go.
The legal and social barriers that barred black people from schools and jobs fell long ago, but economic disparity persists.
Blacks and whites work together and dine side by side in restaurants during the day, but usually don't mingle after 5 p.m.
Racial slurs are rare, but suspicions and tensions remain.
"I
don't think any of us would deny that there have been significant
changes in Birmingham," Shores Lee says. King would be proud, she adds,
but "he would say there's a lot more work to be done. I think he would
tell us our task is not finished."
---
"I
have a dream that one day down in Alabama. ... little black boys and
black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white
girls as sisters and brothers ..." - King, Aug. 28, 1963.
---
Amid
the flowers and soothing fountain in Kelly Ingram Park, there are stark
reminders of the ugly clashes. It was in this area, now known as the
Civil Rights District, where the scenes of police brutality were
captured in photos and TV footage that helped galvanize public opinion
around the nation on behalf of demonstrators.
Today,
the park has statues commemorating King and other leaders. There's a
sculpture of a young protester, his arms stretched back, as a policeman
grabs him with one hand and holds a lunging German shepherd in the
other. (An Associated Press photographer had captured a similar image.)
There are other sculptures of water cannons, more dogs, and a boy and a
girl standing impassively with the words "I Ain't Afraid of your Jail"
at the base.
To those who grew up here, these works are not just artistic renderings but reminders of the bravery of friends and neighbors.
"It's
kind of like being in the movie `The Sixth Sense' - everywhere you go
you see ghosts," Threatt says of the statues. "It's probably like a
person who served in World War II going back to Normandy. It's a place
where something very, very real, very poignant happened to people that
you knew."
Threatt was just 7 when King
announced his vision of a color-blind society before hundreds of
thousands of people gathered on the Washington Mall. Not long afterward,
Threatt was one of three black gifted students enrolled in a white
elementary school. He was spat on, beat up, called the N-word.
The
experience is etched in his memory. Now 57, Threatt occasionally runs
into a 6th grade classmate - a bank vice president - who had been among
his tormenters. They always have a pleasant chat. But he never forgets.
"I
like him," he says. "I don't think he's a racist. He was a kid caught
up in a social situation like I was. .... You've got to get over that in
order to survive in the South. ... Otherwise you just wallow in
self-pity and hatred and you don't move forward."
Threatt
graduated from Princeton, then Howard University Law School, worked in
Denver and Washington, D.C., but returned to Birmingham in 1997. Both he
and the city had changed, he says, with Birmingham becoming more
progressive. He joined an established law firm - something that would
have been unimaginable 50 years earlier.
Threatt
had been inspired, in part, to be a lawyer by Arthur Shores, a Sunday
school teacher at his church and a pioneering civil rights attorney who
fought to desegregate the University of Alabama. Shores' home was bombed
twice in 1963, two weeks apart. His neighborhood was nicknamed
"Dynamite Hill" for the series of bombings intended to intimidate
blacks.
Shores' daughter, Helen, grew up
resisting the segregation laws, once drinking from a "white" fountain - a
defiant act that resulted in a whipping when she got home. At 12, she
aimed a Colt .45 at some white men driving by her family's house,
spewing racial obscenities. Her father, she says, slapped her arm, the
bullet discharged into the air and he quickly grabbed the gun.
She
left Birmingham for 13 years, returned in 1971, later switched careers
and in 2003 became a judge, only to confront lingering remnants of
racism.
In her early years on the bench, she
recalls, a few lawyers pointedly refused to stand as is custom when a
judge enters a courtroom. And, she says, she occasionally sees lawyers
who are disrespectful of their minority clients.
"Racism
is still very much alive and well in the South," Shores Lee says. "The
actions of men here can be legislated but not their minds and their
hearts in terms of how they think and feel about blacks and Hispanics."
The
judge says the same goals her father fought for remain at the center of
court battles today. She points to the Supreme Court's decision in June
to throw out the most powerful part of the landmark Voting Rights Act
that had provided federal oversight of elections in several Southern
states. It was based on a challenge by Shelby County in suburban
Birmingham.
The judge also says when she gives
speeches about voting rights, she sometimes cites her father. "How far
have we come if he talked about this 60 plus years ago and I'm still
talking about it today?" she asks.
Donna Lidge
didn't speak for decades about her painful past. Every morning, she'd
board a school bus, pass an elderly white woman standing on a corner,
cursing and making an obscene gesture. Inside the predominantly white
school, she and her younger sister were ostracized. "We despised that
school," she says.
Lidge said her mother would console them, saying: "'I want you to get an education. That's how you will fight back.'"
She
now tells her daughter, Ashley, a teacher, about those days. "I talk to
her about respect. I say no matter who it is, respect others."
Fifty years ago, the struggle to end racism had white supporters. It still does.
James
Rotch, a white lawyer, began addressing the issue in 1998 when he
launched the Birmingham Pledge - a program to eliminate racism and
prejudice.
The "pledge" has evolved into a
foundation with conferences and a special week of events held around the
September anniversary of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church that killed four girls in 1963. The program's educational
materials are used in every state and 21 countries.
The
pledge itself - a mission statement - has popped up in places ranging
from a public bulletin board outside the Taj Mahal in India to a job
training center in Connecticut.
Rotch says the
intent is to inspire beyond the city. "We knew that Birmingham was
known all over the world and not necessarily in a particularly good
way," he says. "We thought we could show ... that by Birmingham getting
its act in order with regard to race, people might say, `If they can do
it given their history, surely we can.'"
Not everyone shares his interest in emphasizing race.
"There
are a lot of very good, very well-intentioned people who say, `Look if
we stop talking about all this, it'll all go away.' I don't believe
that," he says. "...If we pretend it's not there, then we'll never solve
it."
In the last 15 years, Rotch says the two
races have become more comfortable with one another. And for those 30
and younger, "they really don't understand why anyone would be
prejudiced," he says. "They intermingle easily and they just don't see
what the big deal is."
Still, there are limits to the socializing.
King's
dream is "real during the day" in workplaces and restaurants, says Jim
Reed, a white bookstore owner. "When people aren't thinking about it,
it's coming true," he says. Once home, however, they aren't inclined to
broaden their circles.
"People don't know how
to jump that divide," even though some would like to, he says. "I see it
as taking a long time to get there. Generations have to change."
---
"....
the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast
ocean of material prosperity. ... the Negro is still languishing in the
corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land."
- King.
---
Victor
Beard juggles two jobs as a cook and earns slightly more than minimum
wage in each. Despite 70-hour weeks, he barely scrapes by.
For Beard - who was born the same year King gave his speech - economic equality for black people is still elusive.
"It's
like after Dr. King died, they threw us a bone and we had to take
whatever scraps were left on it," says Beard, who co-chairs a city
homeless coalition that meets at the Church of the Reconciler. "A lot of
us did that. But some of us here still believe it can be better."
The
Rev. Matt Lacey, senior pastor at the church, sees people struggle
every day. "If you're born poor in the city, it's tough to get on your
feet and harder for blacks than whites."
About 95 percent of his church's homeless ministry is black. "I just don't see that as coincidental," says Lacey, who is white.
Nearly
three-quarters of the city's residents are black, and they're
disproportionately represented among the poor. In a period covering the
Great Recession - 2007-2011 - nearly 31 percent of the black population
in Birmingham lived in poverty, almost twice as high as the number of
white residents, according to federal figures.
Even
so, black entrepreneurs have made enormous gains over the decades. But
they still face disadvantages starting businesses because they have less
personal wealth, less access to capital and fewer social networks, says
Bob Dickerson, director of the Birmingham Business Resource Center.
King,
he says, would understand these obstacles. "I don't know that he
thought 50 years would be enough time even in a perfect society to take a
race of folks who had been slaves and had nothing and grow to have an
economic base that would be equal," Dickerson adds.
In
the political arena, black people also have made huge strides but
haven't been able to convert ballot box muscle to economic power, says
George Bowman, a Jefferson County commissioner with a special memory of
King's speech - he was a 15-year-old South Carolina kid in the crowd
that day.
"We've learned how to get the vote
out and we've found a way to elect our candidates to office but we do
not have the wealth," he says.
There are
instances where both races "are trying their best to work together to
effect some change to show the world that the Birmingham of 2013 is not
the Birmingham of 1963," Bowman says. Still, "there's still a vast gap
between the haves and the have-nots" with black residents far more
likely to be poor, and wealth amassed by a handful of people, most of
them white.
"That," he said, "is why it hasn't changed."
---
"I
have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the
content of their character." - King.
---
From
the altar at the More Than Conquerors Faith Church, Pastor Steve Green
preaches to a congregation that couldn't have existed in King's day.
There
are graduates of once-segregated universities. A generation of kids
comfortable with mixed-race relationships. And political activists who
worked to get out the vote for the nation's first black president.
Yet
there is one constant: Green's congregation is about 90 percent black, a
reminder of King's frequently-quoted declaration that 11 a.m. on Sunday
is "the most segregated hour of Christian America."
King, the pastor says, would turn to the Bible to explain that 50 years isn't all that long to transform an entire society.
"Being
a preacher, I think he would use as the basis the scriptural principle
of seedtime and harvest. I think a lot of the seeds have been planted,"
he says. "They're getting nurtured a little at a time. But I don't think
it's harvest time yet."
One member of Green's congregation, Chastity McDavid, reflects the dramatic change.
Growing up poor in Florida, she says, "I expected prejudice and racism and if it didn't happen, I was pleasantly surprised."
Now she holds a doctoral degree and is a minority health disparity researcher at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.
When
visiting community centers, sometimes addressing elderly, largely white
audiences, McDavid says she's approached those events, alert for signs
of prejudice. "I'd go with an open mind and open heart but be prepared
for whatever," she says. What she's generally found, she says, are
people who've been "accepting, even welcoming."
From
childhood on, McDavid, now 35, always participated in celebrations for
King's birthday, often at school where someone would usually recite the
dream speech.
"He was the greatest example of
how one person could make a difference," she says. "It wasn't so much
the speech itself. ... It was what the speech ignited in the people who
heard it. I felt I could be anything I want because of Dr. King. Had his
dream not been shared, I don't think I would be where I am today."
---
"Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" - King.
---
One
recent summer night, Steve Sills, a member of Green's church, took his
two daughters to a rally to motivate young people about the value of
respect.
The setting was Kelly Ingram Park, ground zero for the turbulence 50 years ago.
Sill's
older daughter, Makiyah, 12, had studied King in school but she didn't
understand the sculptures of vicious dogs and water hoses.
As
they drove home, Sills, a computer teacher at a middle school,
explained the racial hostilities of that era.
He noticed a tear forming
in his daughter's eye.
"She couldn't relate," he says. "Her best friends are white. She couldn't imagine it being that way."
Makiyah, he says, then wondered about the need to erect monuments of a painful chapter of America's past.
"Why would they have this as a reminder?" she asked. "It's sad."
"Yes,
baby, those were terrible days," he replied, "but through the years
we've put those things behind us. ...
This is a part of history. It's
good to revisit these times to show how far we've come."
at Oregon when Kelly was the Ducks’ offensive coordinator there, and
signed with the Eagles in February, not long after Kelly took the job.
But Dixon’s true shot at earning a spot as the No. 3 quarterback behind
Michael Vick and Nick Foles was all but lost once the Eagles drafted
USC’s Matt Barkley in the fourth round in April.
