President Kennedy once posed the question: What does it mean to be an American today when our people are divided like never before? Now as then, many of us have lost direction, will, and sense of historical purpose. The good and just that is in us knows what is necessary for a renewal. For a cure. For a recovery of the most important values that have eluded us, but that still define our path as human beings: freedom, democracy and equal opportunities. The problem is that we don't know where to go or we are too afraid of how to get there.
November 7, 1978. I was 10 years old when my father, the principal of my independent school in Brooklyn, woke me up one morning and told me that school had been canceled. Instead, we would march on the Brooklyn Bridge in the name of black solidarity. This would be my first protest, and while the cause seemed important to me (a Crown Heights civic leader, a black man named Arthur Miller, had been murdered by police and the officers were cleared of any blame), I was afraid.
At school, my classmates and I read with horror about protesters, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, who walked for five days and 54 miles only to be beaten and bloodied by police as they crossed the Selma Bridge. I was terrified, and in my youthful mind, Mayor Ed Koch's racist policies, which I had heard about over dinner and read about in Black News magazine, all but ensured that the bridge would open while we were on it and fall into the East River. . So I refused to leave. Damn freedom and democracy. What use would they be to me if I were dead? Surely there had to be a better way to protest.
Most people know the speech King gave at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march, on a flatbed truck, as the “How Long? It is not a long speech because that is the memorable refrain that he sang five times to quell the frustration in our being. Sick and tired of being sick and tired to wait for justice. This was King as a blues musician, preaching a naïve, if not hopeful, optimism.
The actual title, at least according to some scholars, is “Our God Advances.” Regardless of what we call him, his purpose is clear and tireless. King's words are meant to encourage us, comfort us, and restore our confidence that victory is inevitable. King amplifies Maya Angelou's words: “We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated,” and elevates her message with a divine call to the civil rights movement, that in the difficult and challenging moments of protest, in the frustrating hour , Let us remain committed to the fight. That We are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us. That The path ahead of us is not entirely easy, but we must continue forward.
Easier said than done.
My mother pulled me out from under the kitchen table, or dragged me out of the closet, I don't remember, but my parents had determined that I was going to the march. That I would take the trip with my classmates and my community across the Brooklyn Bridge, which by the way, it doesn't open, kwamemy mother had said, laughing, while I cried a river.
Our demonstration began at the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church on Atlantic Avenue, about a thousand of us, led by their pastor, the Rev. Herbert Daughtry. As we approached the side of the Brooklyn Bridge, my heart raced, my feet grew tired, and my soul bled. I was frozen with fear. But being near the front of the line, I was forced to keep moving. I could see my end, a horror I had never faced. And then, as we crossed, face to face with police in riot gear on horseback, with barking dogs, with imminent death, the pastor began to sing melodically and emphatically these words: We are excited, we can't take it anymore. We are excited, we can't take it anymore. And something happened to me. Something that propelled me forward.
I stood on that bridge and, before I knew what I was doing, I sang. And I stopped crying. The sight of police batons no longer fazed me. The scowling dogs no longer alarmed me. A set of simple words had done it. I couldn't articulate it then, but I no longer felt alone.
In the '90s, as a student at Virginia Tech, I used my words to tell the truth about the vestiges of racism on our campus (fraternities dressed in black on Halloween) and around the world (apartheid, the institutionalized system of white supremacy in the South). Africa. I was on my way to the land of the free and, since King had challenged me, I do not get tired. Decades later, when police brutality would hijack the American dream and turn it into a recurring nightmare for brown and black children blown like sand in a windstorm, human beings around the world would heed King's directive. of Let's walk together, children, because we couldn't allow these parodies to become “normal.”
Between the covers of the Rev. Martin Luther King's bold speech, flows a great sea of possibilities and promises. In this gentle symphony of hope, each line echoes a rising foundation of vision. In the war room of our tired reds, whites, and blues, we become pioneers of this renewal by awakening our consciousness, mustering our courage, and then walking the rocky path through a tunnel of hope. Or, as Dr. King put it: Our God moves forward. And we must do it too.
Kwame Alexander is the producer of “The Crossover” and the editor of “This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets.”
