King's dream, 40 years later: Has it been lost?

By Linda Green
A UMNS Feature

Forty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I have a dream" speech, African Americans have achieved success on many levels -- professional, social and political.

Those were aspirations that King held out in his speech, along with a vision for society as a place of social and economic justice, equity and equality. The speech, delivered Aug. 28, 1963, was a defining moment in the life of the civil rights leader -- a life cut short when King was assassinated April 4, 1968.

King's call was rooted in the American ideal of equity and justice for all. The cornerstone laid through years of struggle in the 1950s and 1960s supported the success that African Americans have enjoyed since then. But what does King's dream mean for today's generations? Does it mean the same thing to Generation X'ers and millennials as it did to their parents, or has it been lost, deferred or reinterpreted?

Leon Franklin, a 21-year-old student at Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta, says he and his peers have had to interpret the dream for themselves "in a cloudy landscape of ideas and interpretations" that leave them "frustrated and confused." He finds that ironic, he says, because "young adults are the dream."

King called for a change in thinking that was far more fundamental than taking social action.

"Young adults comprise the first generation of Americans raised in integrated public school systems, and Jim Crow and 'de jure' segregation exist in their minds as pages in history books," he says.

While the parents hoped their children would grow up in a prejudice-free society, Franklin sees evidence that racism and racial tension remain problems -- the verdict and riots that followed the trial of white Los Angeles police officers accused of beating black motorist Rodney King; the use of Native American imagery in professional sports; the profiling of Arab Americans in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; and attempts to roll back affirmative action.

However, young adults possess greater tolerance because colleges and universities now offer courses in multi-cultural studies that help build sensitivity to the ethnic and cultural traditions of the United States and the world, Franklin said. "It is in these efforts of education that we find many young adults redefining the deferred dream of their parents in exciting and provocative ways."

Trudie Kibbe Reed, president of historically black Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark., wonders if "we've . really claimed personal ownership of King's dream.

"Perhaps because of the failure of my generation to mentor and pass on the dream, too many of our young people do not vote, have little interest in eliminating world hunger, and seem apathetic about addressing a social consensus that appears to take for granted that incarcerating is a better option than educating," Reed says.

"We are reaping many benefits from those who gave their lives for a vision of a world and church in which the full humanity of all might be realized," she says. "It is up to us to break down mental walls that resist that vision, and to work with the generation to come to refashion a society according to King's dream," she said.

"My generation has failed," Reed said. "We have failed both to translate the dream, with the values it embodies -- mutual respect for the dignity of every human being -- to a new generation and to impart that dream to those we mentor today."

The real impact from King's life and vocation came in the trans-formation of mindsets, with the emphasis on accepting people regardless of differences that seem to divide, she says. King called for a change in thinking that was far more fundamental than taking social action. Reed says that if outward behavior does not reflect inner transformation, a revolution in values, then people are deceiving themselves and are not living the dream.

Asked what this generation should be doing to keep her late husband's legacy alive and to keep the movement going, Coretta Scott King, in an interview with BET.com, says, "I think there is a tremendous need for young people to be educated and to understand what Martin Luther King's method of nonviolent social change meant. They have to be informed on the issues, but they have to be informed on how do you organize a campaign to work for change, and that's why his principles of nonviolence that he used are so important.

"I hope the younger generation will study those and understand what it means to live a nonviolent lifestyle, and I would hope that once people are educated they will read a lot of his writings ... and that they would organize themselves."

Last updated on 01/14/2004

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