It wasn’t Dr. King’s dream that America was afraid of, it was the fact that Dr. King woke up.
The Martin of 1963 had a Dream, but the Martin of 1966 had awakened. He visited Elijah Muhammad on Feb. 24, 1966, and for the next two years his message and methods changed from social acceptance to economic development.
The mode of thinking was why spend our dollars at their lunch counters when we can pool our resources and build our own? Why spend money with people who despise us, who view us as less than a human being? (Besides, their food wasn’t that good anyway.)
After meeting with Elijah Muhammad, Dr. King’s focus was on “Do for Self” and “Economic Empowerment.” His head was filled with the principles that came out of that meeting with Elijah, and Dr. King said: ”I’ve been to the mountain top.”
On April 3, 1968, Dr. King called for Black folks to boycott Pepsi, to boycott Wonder Bread, and other large corporations. That evening Dr. King gave his last speech.
To FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as long as Martin was accompanied by Rev. Ralph Abernathy and others whose focus was on inclusion, Hoover was OK with that, but once Dr. King started talking about unity via economic empowerment and opposing the Vietnam War, that’s when Hoover and others became fearful.
As long as Martin dreamt…they were OK. But once Martin woke up and saw the forest through the trees, once Martin woke up and saw the “Promised Land,” he became a threat and America did to our brother what she has a history of doing to Black leadership, taking their lives by any means necessary.
America wants you to only remember the dream, the marches, and one speech. As always, America “white-washes” our history and rewrites it in such a way to generate an outcome conducive to its status quo.
News flash: The Dream is over and America knows it, so she’s doing everything she can to stop the wave of awareness like making Critical Race Theory out to be the boogey man. Telling us what books we can and cannot read. Extracting books from our libraries that shed light on the real truth and not some lies like the BS about Columbus, the hypocrisy of George Washington, or the fallacy of Lincoln freeing the slaves. (Think about it: How can you free something that by nature was never yours to enslave?)
The annual celebrations of Dr. King’s birthday and Black History Month are behind us now. Politicians gave speeches about how they loved Dr. King. They loved him so much they made it a struggle to recognize his birthday as a federal holiday. If America truly viewed him as a great man, then why did we have to fight — why was it such a struggle to make his birthday a holiday? They are a bunch of hypocrites.
We don’t need to see you in our churches every year telling us how much you admire Dr. King. You’re present that one day and out of dodge by sundown.
America, you have Hell on your hands now with this new generation coming up who are not going for it, whom you can’t rock-a-bye to sleep… now that The Dream is over …
Carnal Hobson Jr. is a Riverhead native. He resides in Portsmouth, Virginia.
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