Tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington, DC this weekend to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the March On Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speech about a dream he had. Half a century later, disproportionate sentencing policies, life without parole for nonviolent crimes, Stop and Frisk, the pipeline that funnels Africans from schools to prisons, Stand Your Ground laws and Trayvon Martin are blaring signals from alarm clocks screaming that it’s time for us to wake up and get to work.
It’s important to understand the progress toward freedom, justice and equality that was achieved during the period of the sixties was not due to one man, one march or one speech, but was the result of organized struggles against oppression that were occurring in Africa, Asia, Latin America and in many cities, right here in the United States.
Lumumba in Congo, Nkrumah in Ghana, Kemathi in Kenya, Mao in China, Fidel in Cuba, Malcolm X in Harlem, Huey Newton, in Oakland, Fred Hampton in Chicago, Robert F. Williams in Monroe, NC and Omali Yeshitela in St. Petersburg and the revolutionary organizations they led are representative of the spirit of that era.
The reason why many of the names above are unfamiliar to you is because the people who wake up and work hard at perpetuating this predatory social system, where courthouses are open more than school houses and seventy-five percent of the people in the world live off a mere ten dollars a day, have to make us believe that dreaming and marching is the beginning and end of our struggle in order to maintain that system.
We cannot keep hitting the snooze button on the alarm clock, continuing to dream; we have to work! History proves African people are capable of accomplishing any task and overcoming any obstacle when we organize and do the work.
It is our responsibility to make our communities and the entire world a place where we can enjoy the same quality of life in Robles Park as people experience in Hyde Park. We must do it now, so that fifty years later our children will have not the dream of freedom to celebrate, but the reality of it.
Salute!
To share feedback call 813-810-3582. To read this entire article, see other work from LIFE or purchase LIFE’s new book “On Black On Black Love…,” log on to www.LIFEIZPOETRY.com.