I Am Celebrating Juneteenth 2020 with Martin King, Jr. and Langston Hughes
Make America Great Again? No, “Let America Be America Again” because “We want to be free”!
On April 3, 1968, one day before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., our prophet and oracle, in a sermon at the Mason Temple in Memphis, TN gave his final earthly verdict on America:
Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same: ‘We want to be free.’”
In June 2020, fifty-two years after Dr. King’s death, something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up in Minneapolis, N.Y. City, Atlanta, Seattle, Dallas, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, London, Paris, Berlin and in so many other places.
After more than one-half century, their cry has not changed one bit. It is the same as always, “We want to be free!”
Free from police brutality.
Free from dehumanization, discrimination, criminalization, demonization and oppression.
Free to live with equality and dignity in the “land of the free and home of the brave.”
Free to breathe God’s good air and never have to say, “I can’t breathe.”
Free from slavery.
June nineteenth (Juneteenth) is the day we celebrate our deliverance from slavery in America.
In September 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect in January 1863 declaring “all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.” Lincoln promised the federal government of the United States will “will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.”
The Proclamation was not enforced in Texas until two months after the Civil War had ended in June 1865 when it was read in the City of Galveston declaring all enslaved persons in that state to be free. Juneteenth marks the official burial of slavery in America.
In December 1865, the thirteenth amendment was ratified: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
But black people in America continued to wear, by law and force of arms, the badges of slavery and denied their right to vote, own property, enter into a contract, sit on juries.
The slave codes quickly changed into black codes and got institutionalized as Jim Crow laws.
Until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, over a century after the end of the Civil War, black Americans were forced to live in segregation unable to freely access public accommodations. They could not use public parks or white-owned restaurants, hotels and other public facilities. They had to wait in segregated waiting rooms in bus and train stations, drink from separate water fountains and use designated restrooms and public entrances, among other indignities.
Until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, every trick in the book was tried to disenfranchise black people including poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries, violence and terrorism and restrictive and arbitrary registration process, among others.
The U.S. Constitution proved to be the ultimate proof of the proposition, “Justice delayed (for a hundred years after the Civil War that ended slavery) is justice denied.”
But Dr. King knew, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.”
In the very last speech he gave before his death, Dr. King said the descendants of slaves in America “will get to the Promised Land” though he had doubted he will be there with them. But that did not matter to him because he had been to the mountain top and seen the Promised Land.
As I contemplate Dr. King’s words on Juneteenth 2020, Dr. King’s Promised Land to black people and people of color is beginning to look more and more like a Waste Land.
“Is the Promised Land the motherland and fatherland for those with darker skin?”, I ask myself.
Why is America a fantasyland, a wonderland, a heartland and a dreamland for its white citizens by and large and a strange land and an island of poverty for its citizens of color?
Fifty seven years ago, Dr. King said, “One hundred years [after emancipation] the colored American lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
Dr. King’s words spoken in 1963 at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom ring so true in 2020:
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
So, we must dramatize this shameful condition of neo-slavery and expose the noxious creed of “Make American Great Again”.
No country ever became great by brutalizing, dehumanizing, criminalizing, demonizing and ghettoizing its most vulnerable citizens.
How can America be great when the president of the United States deliberately selects Juneteenth to hold his reelection campaign in Tulsa, OK, the location of one of one of the worst massacres of black people in US history in 1921. A white vigilante mob using guns and explosives killed some 300 black people in a black neighborhood called Greenwood (“Black Wall Street”) and destroyed thousands of businesses and homes.
Yet I hear echoes of Langston Hughes’ voice humanizing America though he felt deep in his heart, “America was never America to me.”
Strangely, Hughes felt at home in a strange land where he can dream his way out of a long nightmare of captivity:
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.America never was America to me.
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of loveO, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
But can America be America again for the millions of young black men who find neither liberty nor equality, but mortality, in the air they breathe?
America never was America to them.
But has America ever been America to…
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
But we will let America be America again, and great too because we are ONE and
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.
I too have a dream for America, the same dream Martin and Langston cherished. “We want to be free.”
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”
Yes, I too, torn from Black Africa’s strand, as a teenager came to America one-half century ago.
I shall do all in my power to rebuild in America a homeland of the free and let America be America again.
Happy Juneteenth to all freedom loving people!
