Many Americans focus on the Rev. Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech as if it were the only thing he ever said. This over-emphasis is coupled with a fetish-like appeal to self-proclaimed "civil rights leaders" as if they were elected to represent black communities.
King's dreams, however, will only become reality if we move away from the ideas of those who have turned the black church into a political pawn and return to the themes of the traditional black church that produced the civil rights leaders of the past.
King's later speeches reveal additional dreams for black Americans that leaders such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Julian Bond, Maxine Waters and many in the Congressional Black Caucus have failed to actualize.
The black church produced the likes of King, Rosa Parks, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the Rev. Joseph Lowery and others because of a burden for social justice and personal dignity. Its emphasis on social justice did not appear as a rationalization for a secular political agenda. Instead, it was based on the moral imperatives derived from Scripture and the teaching of the Christian church.
In this tradition, King, in his 1967 speech "Where Do We Go From Here," contended that, if America is to be great, we blacks first "must massively assert our dignity and worth." The current "black leadership" conditions blacks to see themselves as perpetual inferior victims with no inherent dignity and requiring no personal moral values.
Expecting the best of blacks is futile in this line of thinking. Young blacks have been told their entire lives that they are victims and that the world is set against them.
Victimology has done nothing but undermine the higher goal of living as men and women of dignity. As a result, many blacks treat themselves, others, their families and their communities as though they are without dignity, thereby encouraging the nihilism reflected in broken families, drug abuse, violence, separatism, dependence, anti-intellectualism and abortions. This is not what King had in mind.
King encouraged Americans to "be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted." However, this is exactly what occurred under the watch of the current leadership.
The potential of individual blacks is wasted by herding them into sports and entertainment industries and schools with low standards, keeping blacks dependent on government programs, and shackling blacks to group-think ideology. As King noted, "the dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement."
There is hope. There are black leaders who are true to the themes of the black church and the vision of King's other dreams to call people to a lifestyle of great dignity. Among them are Bishop G.E. Patterson in Memphis, the Rev. Lance Lewis in Philadelphia, Bishop Eddie Long in Atlanta, Bishop T.D. Jakes in Dallas, the Rev. Weldon Williams in Chicago and Bishop Charles E. Blake in Los Angeles. There are countless others.
These are the pastors who are calling blacks to lives of dignity in their sexuality, marriage, family, education, speech, personal morals and business practices. If America is to be the great nation King dreamed of, it will take this new leadership to usher us to the next level.
