US: MLK’s dream stars of the 60th anniversary of the 1963 March
Lieutenant Colonel Elmarie Myburgh, South Africa's only criminal profiler, poses for a photograph in her office in Pretoria on September 20, 2021. - Criminal profiling is a tough job anywhere in the world, but especially in South Africa, where someone is killed every 25 minutes and 115 rapes are reported every day. Her cramped Pretoria office overflows with files of interrogations, ballistics, blood reports, and medical examinations. All of it is crime scene evidence she's used to reconstruct the personalities of murderers, which helps police track down suspects. (Photo by WIKUS DE WET / AFP) (Photo by WIKUS DE WET/AFP via Getty Images)
On Aug. 28, 1963, from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. began by speaking of poverty, segregation and discrimination and how the United States had reneged on its promise of equality for Black Americans.
However, reflecting on if America has achieved King’s dream sixty years ago, Martin Luther King III, King’s oldest son, said he thought “we would be further”.
“It’s a totally different time for the 60th because really things have gone temporarily backward. Civility in the political space is temporarily lost,” King III said. “You have issues where hate and hostility and bigotry are at an all-time high. It may certainly exist in 1963, but it is metastasized to something that we are not familiar with.”
King III said that is why we need to constantly review and learn from our history.
“I want to see this mosaic of America that is saying in unison, I am the dream, and we going to work to do everything we can to ultimately realize the dream,” King III said.
Organizers intend to remind the nation that the original march wasn´t just about dreaming of a country that lived up to its promises of equality and liberty to pursue happiness. They wanted legislative action then, and they want the same now.
The survival of American democracy depends on it, the organizers say.
By Agencies
