Dr King’s words made this a better world

On another August Wednesday, exactly fifty years ago, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. made a speech that, in America, now stands alongside President Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 Gettysburg Address.

In a beautiful cadence Dr King thrust this big idea and ideal into the hearing and hearts and minds of millions of people: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the 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 colour of their skin, but by the content of their character…

“I have a dream today.” 

On that day, without the benefit of today’s technology, I didn’t learn about Dr King’s speech until some days thereafter. I knew that a march and demonstration was planned. I knew that the march had started. But I did not hear that speech on that day.

Over the last fifty years, I have listened to that speech countless times. I am still fascinated by Dr King’s cadence and articulation. That idea has always been a part of my adult values and philosophy.

Though Dr King was speaking three years after the barriers of formal racial discrimination had been dismantled in Bermuda, Bermuda still had a long way to go before black Bermudians were more judged by the content of their character than by the colour of their skins.

With my feet firmly planted in 2013, with the stranglehold of Bermuda’s all-white Bermudian oligarchy removed, with a black man in the Oval Office, with black and brown faces commonly found in all the halls of power all over the world, I see how much has changed. Really changed.

On August 28 1963, Nelson Mandela  was in jail on remand as a terrorist awaiting trial in white-ruled Apartheid South Africa. Mandela’s trial and his “Rivonia trial declaration” was still three months in the future.

It took until 1990 before Nelson Mandela walked out of jail. It took another four years before Mandela was sworn in as president of a hugely changed Republic of South Africa. 

In the US, where just over 3,400 black Americans are publicly recorded as being lynched between 1882 and 1964, Barack Obama’s installation as President of the USA happened in 2009. But Obama’s elevation to the Oval Office followed many other quiet but important shifts as black and brown men and women from all over the globe helped turn Dr King’s American dream into a global reality.

Brown men purchased landmark English firms like Jaguar Land-Rover. Brown faces moved into many Wall Street C-Suites, appearing as CEO’s and CFO’s, and displacing American WASP’s. And a multitude of brown talking-heads turned up on CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and all the other global news networks as commentators and experts and people whose opinions really mattered.

On the dark side, 19 brown men followed the diktat of Osama bin Laden and brought world superpower USA to its knees. They grounded all flights over the whole of the USA and drove the President of the USA into an underground shelter, even if only for a very short time.

With my feet firmly planted in 2013, I see change. However, I do not see the perfect world that some think that Dr Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about on that day. Dr King was a realist. Dr King had suffered beatings and jailing. On Wednesday afternoon, August 28 1963, I do not believe that Dr King was speaking about a future perfect world.

I believe that Dr. King’s dream was of a world that needed to change. A world that would change.

I believe that the whole world has changed. I believe that Dr King’s words helped, and helped immeasurably, in further spurring national and global change that was already underway. 

I’m glad I was alive and aware of that day. Today, as so many times in the past, I’ll listen to that timeless speech one more time and then go on playing my small part in helping to make that dream come true.