Marching on: Martin Luther King's dream is a work in progress

Jan. 14—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.

That is perhaps the most remembered line from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, 16 minutes of riveting rhetoric spoken on Aug. 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in front of 250,000 civil rights supporters during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Considered among America's most iconic addresses almost before its echoes had faded, the speech called for civil and economic rights and an end to racism in the United States and concluded with King expressing the hope that one day people of all colors and creeds —

... will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last."

Today, as we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, where is his dream more than 60 years after he disclosed it in that speech, more than 55 years after he was assassinated in Memphis?

"Things are getting better, and I still have hope," said the Rev. Charles E. Becknell Sr., 82, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of New Mexico and a member of SCLC's national board of directors. "But we still have roadblocks and barriers.

"We have people going to Congress and getting paid for doing nothing. We need leadership right now. We need to wake up in this country and start taking care of each other."

Cathryn McGill, 63, founder and director of the New Mexico Black Leadership Council, said progress has been made, but people still are not judged by the content of their character and racism still exists. And, she said, we cannot depend on our political leaders to shape a better future.

"We need to do that, one person at a time," she said. "Our north star has to be created individually. All you need is a heart for service."

Hakim Bellamy, 45, Albuquerque's first poet laureate, was born 15 years after King's "I Have a Dream" speech, but he grew up in a Black church in New Jersey that did not separate its faith from activism. The challenge, he said, was "What are you going to do for God's children here on Earth?"

Bellamy thinks our country has yo-yoed on King's dream.

"We have gone a long way, but not far enough," he said. "We have gotten closer, and we have gotten farther away. At the present time, we seem farther away."

Mixed emotionsBecknell grew up in Hobbs, received bachelor's and master's degrees in secondary education from Albuquerque's College of St. Joseph and a doctorate in American studies from the University of New Mexico. He served as the state's criminal justice secretary under governors Jerry Apodaca and Bruce King and was the first director of UNM's African-American Studies program.

Forty-six years old when he was ordained to the ministry, he founded Emmanuel Missionary Baptist Church in Rio Rancho and served as its pastor until a few years ago. His son is pastor there now.

Becknell never met Martin Luther King Jr., but as a member of the national board of the SCLC, an organization of which King was the first president, he has associated with people who worked closely with the martyred civil rights leader.

"His footprints are still all over that organization," Becknell said. "People who knew him — Bernard Lafayette — are still around. C.T. Vivian died just a few years ago."

Lafayette played a major role in organizing the Selma (Alabama) Voting Rights Movement. Vivian is famous in the annals of civil rights activism for getting punched to the ground by a white sheriff on the steps of the Selma courthouse and getting back up and continuing to argue for his rights.

"During a (SCLC) board meeting in Atlanta five or six years ago, I asked C.T. why he did that," Becknell said. "I told him I thought I would have got up swinging. He said, 'If I had reacted in any other way, (King's) whole nonviolent concept might have been abandoned.' It's just a privilege to know these guys, to hear the stories they tell, hear about the sacrifices they made."

Becknell said he has mixed emotions when he hears Americans today talk about our democracy being in jeopardy.

"There's a lot of talk about preserving democracy and supporting the Constitution," he said. "This is nothing new to African Americans. We have always pursued the dream of having the Constitution applied to us, but when we were pursuing our constitutional rights, only a few supported us.

"We want the Constitution applied to everyone. We want affirmative action, voting rights, equal opportunity for everybody. As we moved forward we wanted to bring others with us — Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, women. They all benefited from Dr. King and the civil rights movement."

Progress is undeniable. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the Fair Housing Act in 1968. A Black man was elected to the presidency and then re-elected. A Black woman serves as vice president today. But Becknell said even advances come at a price.

"People turn on the TV and see all these Black faces, brown faces, Asian people getting into the system, and they get frightened," he said. "They worry they are going to lose the power they denied to others all these years."

Becknell said King stood for using power for everyone's benefit, but noted the civil rights leader would be disappointed by how it is used — or not used — in America today. Power has not subdued poverty, for example.

"I believe that everybody in this country deserves three meals a day," Becknell said. "We have enough food. It breaks my heart to see kids whose only meal each day is the one they get at school. Kids who are hungry and suffering poverty hate snow days because they don't get anything to eat."

Absolutely!Bellamy is a national and regional poetry slam champion, was Albuquerque's inaugural poet laureate in 2012 to 2014, was once an on-air host for New Mexico PBS and worked as deputy director for the City of Albuquerque's Department of Arts and Culture from 2018 to 2022.

Now in his second year of law school at UNM, Bellamy is an eloquent commentator — in his poetry and in everyday discourse — about the issues of the day.

He said that even though there have been attempts to neutralize racial prejudice, it still exists.

"I don't hear the 'N word' a hundred times a day as my grandfather did," he said. "But do I have a harder time getting a house loan? Absolutely. Am I more likely to get pulled over by the police? Absolutely. Sixty years is not a lot of time to undo 300 years of chattel slavery in this country."

Bellamy said the big ideas of King's dream get mired down in the clumsy apparatus of city governments, police departments, judicial systems and the divide in Congress. He thinks it is important to get a Congress that can work together.

"How do you actually march the march when things die in committee?" he said. "It used to be the middle was the loudest, and now it is the extremes. Both parties have ceded power to their fringe elements. How do you get good people in there when to win you have to be more radical than people who believe in conspiracy theories?"

He thinks election finance reform is the key.

"You've got to get big money out of politics," he said. "You will see more single mothers running for office when they don't have to compromise with prison companies and fossil fuel companies in order to get enough funding to win. When they don't have to lie to get elected. Special interests, the (National Rifle Association), want you to work for their interests. Then how much time do you have to work for the people in your district who just want to go to school without getting shot?"

Bellamy likely would not be in law school if he did not believe in a more promising future.

"There are a lot of good laws on the books," he said. "Politics is a pendulum, and I do believe it will swing back."

'Not giving up'

McGill grew up in Muskogee, Oklahoma, but has lived in Albuquerque since 1984.

She said King dreamed of eliminating racism and police brutality and supporting integration and brotherhood, justice for all, voting rights, economic opportunity, and peace and nonviolence.

"It looks like we are on the brink of World War III, and we still have not achieved ultimate harmony and happiness," she said. "Is there progress? Yes. But there is still a wound and pain. Do we focus on the pain, or do we work to bring about the solution and the healing as Dr. King advised?"

The Black Leadership Council, founded by McGill in 2019, is her response to that question. The nonprofit organization's focus is the promotion of youth development, advocacy and civic engagement, workplace and leadership development, mental, physical and financial health, and cultural vibrancy.

"It takes each one of us to create a better future for ourselves and our children," she said. "We have a personal responsibility for being part of the solution. What is it you want to see and how do you make it happen?"

Right now she is looking for mentors in the community who can support schools because she sees education for children of color plunging to a crisis level. She said a girls basketball team at an Albuquerque Public Schools middle school may not have a season because they don't have a coach.

"Where is that one person to step up and be a basketball coach for these girls?" she said.

McGill said racism finds its way into courtrooms and schools in insidious ways. And the source, she said, is not always the people we label as bigots and white supremacists.

"Racism manifests itself perhaps even more dangerously among liberal racists, people who will have to check their privilege at the door to create a level playing field," she said.

Even though King's dream has not been fully realized, McGill understands the need to strive for its fulfillment.

"The day we stop aspiring for the things Dr. King put out in his speech is the day we give up," she said. "But we are not giving up."

Radical optimist

Fred Harris, 93, of Corrales, a Democrat, was a U.S. senator from Oklahoma from 1964 to 1973 and chairman of the Democratic National Committee from January 1969 to March 1970. He was also a longtime professor of political science at UNM.

In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Harris to the Kerner Commission, which was created to investigate the causes of race riots in Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, New Jersey and other U.S. cities.

The commission was made up of eight white men, a white woman and two Black men — Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, and Edward Brooke, a Republican U.S. Senator representing Massachusetts.

"The first thing we did was hold 20 days of hearings," Harris said. "We had a huge number of witnesses, from (FBI Director) J. Edgar Hoover to Martin Luther King. Dr. King was very passionate about doing something about race and poverty. He was not flamboyant. He had a very quiet and calm demeanor and presentation. He was a very sober and serious person and felt deeply about these issues. He had a lot of influence on us (the commission), as he did on the country."

After those hearings, commission members visited the riot-torn cities to gather information on the ground. The report it released on Feb. 29, 1968, stated that Black frustration, caused by a lack of economic opportunity and white racism, was at the heart of the rioting.

It warned that "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal." Recommended solutions included new jobs, decent housing, better education and the elimination of segregation. Harris believes the Kerner Commission report made an impact — for a while.

"You had to do something about people's economic situation," he said. "Everything we said in that report applied not just to Blacks, but to whites, urban, rural, Native Americans, Hispanics, all people. And we made progress on virtually all of our recommendations for about 10 years. In recent years, we have done a lot of backsliding and we need to change."

In February 2018, "Healing Our Divided Society," a 50-year update of the Kerner Commission report, edited by Harris and Alan Curtis of the Eisenhower Foundation, was released.

It showed that racial discrimination is still widespread, white supremacists have become emboldened and more violent and that many people of color are being relegated to slums and their children to inferior schools. It noted that the number of children living in poverty had increased from 15.6% in 1968 to 21% in 2017.

"We found in the cities that we looked at again, conditions were worse," Harris said. "Poverty was more concentrated. People who were poor were poorer than they had been."

Harris concedes that as a country, we had been closer to realizing King's dream in the past than we are now.

"Generally, that's true of American history," he said. "We have generally made things better, but every now and then we stumble backwards. But I call myself a radical optimist. I think the arc of the universe bends toward justice."

And he believes true democracy remains the surest route to the realization of King's dream.

"When we struggle toward full democracy, we always make progress," he said. "And democracy is not fragile in America. It survived Jan. 6 (the attack on the U.S. Capitol). It prevailed in all the court battles to overturn the (2020) election. Democracy won and will continue to win."