MLK and the March toward Justice: We share The Dream. Do we share the will?

On the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the great struggle of Dr. King’s life, the War on Poverty, is still a dream.  Vauhini Vara reminds us in "Race and Poverty 50 Years after the March": 

"In 2011, the median income for black households was about fifty-nine per cent of the median income for white households, up slightly from fifty-five per cent in 1967."

As the world is ablur with powerful sentimental evocations of the impact of the Dream, I'm reminded of these lines from Dr. King's last major speech, "Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution," presented on March 31, 1968 at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. just a few days before he was assassinated in Memphis on April 4.  In this speech, he talked about racial prejudice, poverty, and "the myth of time:" 

"It [the myth of time] is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And there are those who often sincerely say to the Negro and his allies in the white community, "Why don’t you slow up? Stop pushing things so fast. Only time can solve the problem. And if you will just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out."

There is an answer to that myth. It is that time is neutral. It can be used wither constructively or destructively. And I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

 We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.

Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience that the nation doesn’t move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.

And while 50 years have shown that our efforts have not been tireless, or our work persistent enough, our action direct enough, to enact the change needed to fulfil the dream, we are still inspired by the hope Dr. King provides: "the time is always ripe to do right."

The question is, will we do it?  Dr. King goes on in his speech to emphasize the link between racial prejudice and social injustice, locating the roots of poverty in our refusal to find solutions even though we know they exist:

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world - and nothing’s wrong with that - this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.

50 years after Dr. King's dream became an integral part of the national consciousness, and 45 years after his death, after his call that we "remain awake through the great revolution," we find we have dozed off, and find ourselves still asking the same question.

All of us share the dream, or at least all of us with open hearts and moral compasses. But how many of us share the will?

 

"I can hear the God of history saying:
'That was not enough!'"
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his last major speech:
"Remaining Awake through the Great Revolution", March 31, 1968 

 "We refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt."
50 years ago today: August 28, 1963
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s most famous speech, "I Have a Dream,"
delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom