I wanted to take the time today to give honor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His sacrifices in his life, which ultimately resulted in his untimely death, has made it possible for African-Americans to live as human beings, and not as a second class citizen. Or worse, as an animal. Because African-Americans, such as myself, have always been seen as even lower than an animal simply because of the color of our skin. I also wanted to remind people that the dream continues. We have achieved great things and overcome much, but we still have a long way to go.
“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. I have a dream today.”
We’ve come far, but we still have a long way to go. We’ve come far from Jim Crow, and the Black Codes and Separate, but Equal laws designed to break us as a people. We’ve come a long way from slavery. Or even being only good enough to serve whites by keeping their homes clean, families fed, being a mammy to their children, or working their fields. We’ve come far from lynchings and cross burnings.
Emmett Till
No. Not even with Oprah Winfrey, Tyler Perry, Michael Jackson or other African-Americans that have achieved great success. Not even with a black President in the office. This is not hardly a post racial America. More closeted racists have come out of the racists closet during Obama’s presidency than has in a long time. Particularly with the rise of the Tea Party, one of the most,in my opinion, racist political groups to rear it’s ugly head. And like the slave owners used to do, they justify their attitude and why they do what they do in the name of God. Amazing.
We have yet to be judged solely by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. No matter what we achieve as a people there are still people that hate us for what we are. There are those that still refuse to see the beauty in us. The word of God tells us
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28 KJV.
But many still refuse to honor that truth.
We are no longer slaves in the old sense. But there is a new form of slavery being waged against the black community today: economic slavery. We are now being enslaved as a people through economic means. We are enslaved through the legal system. There are more black men in our jails and prisons than any other race. There are more poor disadvantaged blacks than there are other races in this country. While many of us have awesome careers, many others do not. The haves and the have not’s are still great amongst our people. Run down schools with no books, welfare, poor housing and more. Even when we are more educated than our white counterparts we still get passed over for jobs, or are paid less than whites. No, we still have a long way to go.
The Civil Rights Movement broke down many barriers for African-Americans. And because of the sacrifices of many, not just Dr. King, we can live well even amongst so much that is still so wrong. We’ve come far. But the struggle still continues in many ways. We must continue to strive for excellence, justice and equality. Dr. King’s dream continues on.
Oscar Grant
In 1972 it was discovered that horrible experiments were being done on black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, and had been since 1932. That’s forty years people. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was a clinical trial where black men were lied to by being told they would receive free health care from the government, but they were really being left untreated so that scientists could see how untreated syphilis would progress. This study is chronicled in the movie Miss Evers’ Boys
starring Alfre Woodard and Laurence Fishburne.
Tuskegee Experiment Test Subjects
Six hundred poor African-American men from Macon, Alabama were enrolled in the study with 399 who had syphilis before the study had begun and 201 who never had the disease. The men were never told they had syphilis, were never treated for it, and were only told they had “bad blood.” What were these black men to get out of the deal? Free medical care, free meals and free burial. A cure for syphilis became available in the 1940’s. What cures it? Penicillin. Penicillin was purposely withheld by the doctors involved in the study and they even prevented the patients from being treated for their illness elsewhere. The only reason why the “experiment” stopped was due to a whistle blower who leaked the story to the press.
Many people suffered do to this incredible injustice, including 19 innocent babies that were born with congenital syphilis due to the disease being passed to the wives of the untreated men. The 40 wives that contracted the disease also died. Not very many people felt sorry for what was done. What did the study clinicians say about it all?
“For the most part, doctors and civil servants simply did their jobs. Some merely followed orders, others worked for the glory of science.” – Dr John Heller, Director of the Public Health Service’s Division of Venereal Diseases
John R. Heller of Public Health Services stated
“The men’s status did not warrant ethical debate. They were subjects, not patients; clinical material, not sick people.”
How do you like that for a defense against mistreatment of innocent people? Only 74 men survived the experiments out of the 600, with 100 dying of complications of the disease and the others dying from the disease itself.
And the list goes on. Professors at several universities in 2011 have come to work to find nooses on the doorknobs to their offices. In late 2011 a biracial couple were denied the right to marry or attend a particular church because the man is African and the woman white by her churches congregation. Black kids have been wrongly imprisoned, as in the case of The Jena Six in 2006. Who are the Jena Six? They were a group of high school kids that defended themselves against a group of racist white students. Two black students sat under the so-called “white” tree on campus. In retaliation some white students decided to hang nooses from the tree. One day a racist white student started slinging racial slurs, including calling the black students Nigger. A fight promptly erupted ending with six of the black students being charged with second-degree attempted murder, which was eventually dropped down to a lessor charge. What did the white kids get?
“The school disciplinary process that followed is unclear. It was reported that the principal learned that three white students were responsible and recommended expulsion, that the board of education overruled his recommendation, and that school superintendent Roy Breithaupt agreed with the overruling. It was initially reported that the punishment was reduced to three days of in-school suspension. However, the three students were isolated at an alternative school “for about a month”, spent two weeks on in-school suspension, served Saturday detentions, had to attend Discipline Court, were referred to Families in Need of Services, and had to have an evaluation before they were able to return to school as part of the district’s Crisis Management Policy Procedures.” –Wikipedia
Then there is Henrietta Lacks. Henrietta was a poor black woman from Baltimore, Maryland and the Mother of five children, that was dying from cervical cancer in 1951. Henrietta sought help for a lump in her stomach on January 29, 1951. She died October 4, 1951 at the young age of 30. During her treatment at John Hopkins Hospital her doctor took a two samples of her cervix, a healthy part and a cancerous part, all without her permission or knowledge. The family didn’t learn what had been done until the 1970’s when researchers started contacting them in an attempt to get blood samples from them in an effort to learn the families genetics. This information came out to the general public in 2010 with the release of the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
“As reporter Michael Rogers stated, the growth of HeLa by a researcher at the hospital helped answer the demands of the 10,000 who marched for a cure to polio shortly before Lacks’ death. By 1954, the HeLa strain of cells was being used by Jonas Salk to develop a vaccine for polio. To test Salk’s new vaccine, the cells were quickly put into mass production in the first-ever cell production factory. Demand for the HeLa cells quickly grew. Since they were put into mass production, Henrietta’s cells have been mailed to scientists around the globe for “research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation and toxic substances, gene mapping, and countless other scientific pursuits”. HeLa cells have been used to test human sensitivity to tape, glue, cosmetics, and many other products. Scientists have grown some 20 tons of her cells. Doctors still have not discovered the reason for HeLa cells’ unique vigor, but suspect that it is due to altered telomerase function. There are almost 11,000 patents involving HeLa cells.” – Wikipedia
“According to author Rebecca Skloot, by 2009, “more than 60,000 scientific articles had been published about research done on HeLa, and that number was increasing steadily at a rate of more than 300 papers each month.” – Wikipedia
“Neither Lacks nor her family gave [researcher Geroge Otto]Gey permission to harvest the cells, but, at that time, permission was neither needed nor customarily sought.The cells were later commercialized, although never patented in their original form. Then, as now, there was no requirement to inform a patient, or their relatives, about such matters because discarded material, or material obtained during surgery, diagnosis, or therapy, was the property of the physician and/or medical institution. This issue and Mrs. Lacks’s situation was brought up in the Supreme Court of California case of Moore v. Regents of the University of California. The court ruled that a person’s discarded tissue and cells are not their property and can be commercialized” – Wikipedia
Henrietta Lacks
Though much good has come from Henrietta, her cells should not have been taken without her knowledge. Nor is it right that these cells have been patented worldwide allowing others to make multi billions through the commercialization of her cells while her family has lived in poverty and gets nothing. Most can not even afford health insurance, and therefore don’t even have access to the treatments that have been created through Henrietta’s cells! Even the ruling that the cells and tissue from our own body don’t belong to us is absolutely insane and frightening. It’s mind boggling,obscene,and a blatant form of racism and a blatant thought process that says that our bodies are not to be respected. She was treated like a lab rat. I take offense to that and you should to because it could happen to you too. Yes, it can. Even in 2012. Insanity. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
is a must read. There is far more to this story than I can write here.Even the late King of Pop Michael Jackson was openly discriminated against in the press with the term “Jacko.” Jacko wasn’t just a play on his last name. It was so much more than that.
Here is a quote from “The etymology of Macaca” by Mike Scherer
Jacko Monkey
“According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “Jacko” dates back to the mid-1600s, as a Flemish approximation of the Bantu word for monkey in the Congo and southern Gabon. The word migrated north, taking on all the racist connotations that followed African colonization. By the early 1800s, Jacko Maccacco, a famous fighting monkey, could be found on display in Westminster Pit, a notorious London arena for dog fights. The word had entered the common vernacular, and it eventually became a racist shorthand for blacks.
Today, the word is used mainly by two groups of people: scientists studying African and Asian primates, and bullies looking to insult others for the color of their skin. An online dictionary of ethnic slurs lists “macaque” as a French and Belgian word for black North Africans. In the Oxford Spanish Dictionary, “macaco” and “macaca” carry the colloquial meaning of “little devil,” “Chinaman” and “ugly person.” Anthropologists who study Brazilian street slang have noted that the police will call the local kids “macaco,” or monkey, in reference to their African heritage.”
How many of you knew that the term “Jacko” is equivalent to the slur Nigger? Not many I bet.
We’ve come a long way in making Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream a reality. But the dream hasn’t fully come true yet. God used this man and others that stood along side him, to help us gain justice and equality in a country that desperately wanted to continually rob of us it. We will never have true justice or equality in this imperfect broken down world. But that doesn’t mean we are give up fighting for it. Quite the contrary. We must never give up.
As African-Americans we no longer have to live as someones property to be bought, sold and traded at will by those that deem us to be inferior. We no longer have to live like sub-humans or diseased animals. We can live as people; human beings. We live, love, bleed, all the things that others do. We are not to be looked down upon. We have value too.
If the color of your skin is different than mine, I can now work with you, eat with you, use the same bathroom as you, swim in the same pool as you, stay in the same hotel as you, marry you and have children with you (though some people still haven’t gotten the memo), and not simply serve you or be mistreated by you. God used Martin Luther King, Jr. to help to throw open doors than had long since been closed to us.
We still have to work hard to prove that we are just as good, and just as capable as our white counterparts. But we are managing to work our way up the corporate ladder, build businesses, become doctors and lawyers and provide medical treatment and legal services to people of all races. African-Americans are also some of the most highly paid in music and sports. Many of us have reached millionaire status, and a few have even reached billionaire status. That’s coming a long way from being a slave. Our ancestors could never have foreseen how far we have come, though many prayed for it.
God has brought us through so much, though we must strive to work against negative images propagated against us by our own people who don’t really understand the harm they do with their negative behavior. Just turn on BET, turn on the radio. You know what I mean. We must also strive against the negative images propagated against us all around the world by our own American Media, and film and television, which either excludes us or paints us in a negative, stereotypical light. And police brutality and racial profiling is still a painful reality today. Inequality and injustice still abounds.
We take the freedoms we enjoy today for granted. That’s a grave mistake. Because when we forget or ignore the past we end up destined to repeat it. We must never forget how far we have come. We must never forget all of those that have gone before us to make a way for us. People that toiled, suffered incredible pain and died so that we can be free. Our freedom as a people came with a price, and it wasn’t cheap. Jesus paid a huge price for our spiritual freedom and people like Martin Luther King paid a huge price for our civil freedom; our civil rights.
We’ve come far but we haven’t reached the promised land that Dr. King spoke of yet. But we must not give up. It still feels like an uphill battle sometimes, but we will get there. Thank you Dr. King for your sacrifice. Because of you I have freedoms that many others only dreamed of. I am grateful for all that you did for us as a people. I hope to continue the legacy you have left behind by living a life of excellence, and striving to do even greater things. The color of my skin will never be a barrier to achieving all that God has for me. Though many hate this skin I wear it proudly. The dream is still unfolding but it will come true. Thank you for helping me to be free. Today I honor you. Happy Birthday and God bless you Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” Amos 5:24 KJV
A riot is the language of the unheard. – Address given in Birmingham, Alabama (1963-12-31)
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
Segregation is the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. – Letter from Birmingham
Jail, April 16, 1963
The church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. – Letter from Birmingham
Jail, April 1963
Men often hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don’t know each other; they don’t know each other because they can not communicate; they can not communicate because they are separated. – Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958)
Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy. – The Measures of Man (1959)
There are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good-will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize— I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to— segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self-defeating effects of physical violence. But in a day when sputniks and explorers are dashing through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can win a war. It is no longer the choice
between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence… – Social Justice and the Emerging New Age” (http://www.wmich.edu/library/archives/mlk/transcription.html) address at the Herman W. Read Fieldhouse, Western Michigan University, (18 December 1963)
I must admit that I have gone through those moments when I was greatly disappointed with the church and what it has done in this period of social change. We must face the fact that in America, the church is still the most segregated major institution in America. At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing and Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation. This is tragic. Nobody of honesty can overlook this.
Now, I’m sure that if the church had taken a stronger stand all along, we wouldn’t have many of the problems that we have. The first way that the church can repent, the first way that it can move out into the arena of social reform is to remove the yoke of segregation from its own body. Now, I’m not saying that society must sit down and wait on a spiritual and moribund church as we’ve so often seen. I think it should have started in the church, but since it didn’t start in the church, our society needed to move on. The church, itself, will stand under the judgement of God. Now that the mistake of the past has been made, I think that the opportunity of the future is to really go out and to transform American society, and where else is there a better place than in the institution that should serve as the moral guardian of the community. The institution that should preach brotherhood and make it a reality within its own body. – Interview after his “Social Justice and the Emerging New Age” address (http://www.wmich.edu/library/archives/mlk/q-a.html) at the HermanW. Read Fieldhouse, Western Michigan University, (18 December 1963)
Jesus recognized the need for blending opposites. He knew that his disciples would face a difficult and hostile world, where they would confront the recalcitrance of political officials and the intransigence of the protectors of the old order. He knew that they would meet cold and arrogant men whose hearts had been hardened by the long winter of traditionalism. … And he gave them a formula for action, “Be ye therefore as wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” … We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart. – Chapter 1 : A tough mind and a tender heart
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state, sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. 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. I have a dream today.
Haneefah Turner Copyright © 2012. All Rights Reserved. Please do not copy this article without my express written permission. Thank you.
