Like my hero DJ Khaled might say, they don't want you to dream. Why? Because dreams are dangerous. They challenge what is with what could be. But in the 1960s, during the Civil Rights Movement, a lot of folks dared to dream of a time when young blacks like myself could walk with dignity and live without fear as first-class American citizens. Once those in power realized that they could never stop us from dreaming, they tried to trick us into believing we had already achieved that dream.
The first time I ever really grappled with Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream was in a classroom filled with white faces. I was probably passing love notes back and forth with a caucasian crush when the teacher's creaky tape deck finally reeled into the iconic speech's climax. There, the indomitable orator talks about the future, vividly describing a new day when black kids will join hands with "little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers..."
Even as a kid, decades removed from the tumultuous era in which King first delivered that message, his sentiment gripped me. I understood that in some small way, just by sitting in that suburban classroom, I was living out a tiny part of what he had hoped for my generation.
My parents moved us from the predominantly black east side of Cleveland to the west side suburbs in the early 90s so I'd have access to a better education. When I entered that overwhelmingly white elementary school for the first time, I didn't have to face a vicious mob hocking loogies, throwing stones, or threatening to string me up and watch me strangle to death the way that Elizabeth Eckford did when she first tried to integrate Arkansas's Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Shit, I didn't even have to go in through the back door. I walked right in through the front, everyday, sometimes with my pants sagging below my waistline and my hat on backwards.
Years later, when I was 18, I registered to vote. The first time I exercised that right in a presidential election, I cast my ballot for a black man. I accomplished all of this without being intimidated by domestic terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan or their co-conspirators in law enforcement. No one asked me to take an impossible literacy test, and I didn't have to kiss some funky white man's ass so he could vouch for me. I just did it—I voted for our nation's first black president with the same degree of ease one enjoys when grabbing some take-out for dinner.
These experiences—getting the same education as upper middle-class whites, registering to vote and then being able to actually exercise that right—were the spoils of battles fought by people like King, who literally lost their lives to make it so. And I'm not alone in enjoying the fruit of those victories. A large number of young blacks in this country have been able to reach new heights by standing on the broad shoulders of their forebearers.
I see them out there doing their thing. Maybe they graduated from Yale, maybe they studied abroad for six months in Paris to work on their French, maybe they're developing a hookup app for people who work graveyard shifts, or maybe they're running for office as an independent. They're up to all types of shit—cool, elite shit with seemingly few obstacles standing between them and what King called "cashing a check." Of course, the check they're cashing isn't from a bank, but from the American republic. The rights they're enjoying are enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, those promissory notes from Uncle Sam that have historically bounced for people of color.
Long after the explicit enslavement of blacks ended in 1865, we were still hearing the political equivalent of "insufficient funds" anytime we tried to live like actual first-class citizens. To ensure those checks would cash, there were countless legislative and legal slugfests that culminated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial segregation in public places, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited Jim Crow laws that often made blacks electorally invisible, especially in the South.
The first time I ever really grappled with Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream was in a classroom filled with white faces. I was probably passing love notes back and forth with a caucasian crush when the teacher's creaky tape deck finally reeled into the iconic speech's climax. There, the indomitable orator talks about the future, vividly describing a new day when black kids will join hands with "little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers..."
Even as a kid, decades removed from the tumultuous era in which King first delivered that message, his sentiment gripped me. I understood that in some small way, just by sitting in that suburban classroom, I was living out a tiny part of what he had hoped for my generation.
My parents moved us from the predominantly black east side of Cleveland to the west side suburbs in the early 90s so I'd have access to a better education. When I entered that overwhelmingly white elementary school for the first time, I didn't have to face a vicious mob hocking loogies, throwing stones, or threatening to string me up and watch me strangle to death the way that Elizabeth Eckford did when she first tried to integrate Arkansas's Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Shit, I didn't even have to go in through the back door. I walked right in through the front, everyday, sometimes with my pants sagging below my waistline and my hat on backwards.
Years later, when I was 18, I registered to vote. The first time I exercised that right in a presidential election, I cast my ballot for a black man. I accomplished all of this without being intimidated by domestic terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan or their co-conspirators in law enforcement. No one asked me to take an impossible literacy test, and I didn't have to kiss some funky white man's ass so he could vouch for me. I just did it—I voted for our nation's first black president with the same degree of ease one enjoys when grabbing some take-out for dinner.
These experiences—getting the same education as upper middle-class whites, registering to vote and then being able to actually exercise that right—were the spoils of battles fought by people like King, who literally lost their lives to make it so. And I'm not alone in enjoying the fruit of those victories. A large number of young blacks in this country have been able to reach new heights by standing on the broad shoulders of their forebearers.
I see them out there doing their thing. Maybe they graduated from Yale, maybe they studied abroad for six months in Paris to work on their French, maybe they're developing a hookup app for people who work graveyard shifts, or maybe they're running for office as an independent. They're up to all types of shit—cool, elite shit with seemingly few obstacles standing between them and what King called "cashing a check." Of course, the check they're cashing isn't from a bank, but from the American republic. The rights they're enjoying are enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, those promissory notes from Uncle Sam that have historically bounced for people of color.
Long after the explicit enslavement of blacks ended in 1865, we were still hearing the political equivalent of "insufficient funds" anytime we tried to live like actual first-class citizens. To ensure those checks would cash, there were countless legislative and legal slugfests that culminated with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial segregation in public places, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited Jim Crow laws that often made blacks electorally invisible, especially in the South.
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