Two Worlds
On a late summer, August day, I went for a bike ride and run on Chicago’s lakefront. It was an absolutely, brilliant perfect day. The Loop’s skyline from Promontory Point was stunning- clear, vibrant, the towers a tribute to modern man’s building of the skyscraper. My bike ride was equally beautiful. I biked past so many happy people biking, walking, and running along the Lake Michigan path. It’s a 20 mile gem of a trail. When I finally arrived at the Olive Park beach, just north of Navy Pier, the most visited tourist place in Chicago, I sat on a ledge eating my lunch and taking in the diversity of humanity. All seemed serene, joyous, as though nothing terrible was happening on planet earth.
After I rode back to Promontory Point, it was equally invigorating- Blue, aqua vistas. I wanted to take everything of the site into my being and bottle it, so I could drink it on especially grey, gun metal February days. When I drove out of the area past Washington Park and King Drive, I drove into a world where I wonder if anyone ever visits the lake, takes a bike ride, or communes with others on golden Chicago beaches.
It was like I had been transported into some other reality.
Only three miles from the lakefront, I could have been thousands of miles away in a 3rd world country. This was Englewood, one of the poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the city. I saw no tourists here, only guys with long white t-shirts and baggy pants. Some even wore white T-Shirts on their head. Empty lots were scattered with litter and broken bottles, and there was a general sense of despair in the air. It was here that I encountered numerous men with crumpled cardboard sign saying they were homeless as I waited to turn onto the Dan Ryan Expressway. Could you please help and other street entrepreneurs hawking everything from water to socks. Two Americas only a few miles apart. Englewood almost 100 % poor African American with an unemployment rate of 50% and thousands of mostly white tourists with a supply of disposable income. This is the vexing reality of work in America’s urban centers, and it portends to be even more of a problem in the days ahead with the current state of the American economy.
John W. Fountain, an African American writer, educator, and Pentecostal preacher perhaps put it best when he drove west on 71st Street on a recent day.
“The daily life of the Negro is still lived in the basement of the Great Society.”
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.,
from “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”
More than four decades later, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words ring louder than the thunder on this gray summer day as I drive down Emmett Till Road. The skies cry.
The “dream” now more resembles a nightmare, no matter how great our stride toward freedom, or having now witnessed a black man sworn into the White House, or even the looming dedication Sunday of the grand white-stone structure on the National Mall in King’s memory.
Out here, in ghetto America this afternoon, the sound of thunder echoes. I hear no drum majors of justice amid the vast mountain of despair I see with my own eyes on 71st Street, which also bears in memoriam the name of the Chicago boy lynched in 1955 in Money, Miss.
I do, however, see signs of the times. Brown-and-white honorary street signs bearing Emmett’s name hang above these rain-washed streets that too often run red with blood — the blood of the young, the blood of the innocent, the blood of a nation.
It is one of many memorials I have witnessed over the years. Among them: shrines of teddy bears and red roses, candles and fluttering balloons, sometimes dotted with empty liquor bottles, always with prayers and heavenly wishes and signed “R.I.P.” They are memorials paid for with blood. And our inscription wall bears the tragic epitaph of our babies.
The cold rain falls steadily as I roll west. More signs: Signs of poverty. Signs of despair. Signs of economic stagnation, human degradation and social segregation against which King fought. Less apparent are signs of fulfillment of the dream for which King died.
And even as we stand poised to celebrate his life and legacy, I see more reasons to mourn. I find more just cause to come together to heal urban neighborhoods than to travel from near and far to partake in star-studded ceremonials for a lifeless stone monument that most poor children will never visit. For here, in the wilderness, our great Promised Land mission remains incomplete and in urgent need of resuscitation — in need of more than status-quo churches, celebrity preachers and poverty pimps. In need of true ambassadors of love, justice, freedom and equality.
For even on this side of the Jordan, I see a wilderness of segregation and failing public schools that have become weapons of mass destruction. I see a wilderness of economic disparity marked by a recent study showing the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of blacks. I see a new Jim Crow, self-hate and complacency, crumbling families and community, the cannibalism of young black men. I see an absence of hope.
I see an America that remains divided — ever more by class and also by race. An America at war from without and also from within.
I continue west in my search for hope — past a flickering, blue-light police camera — through Englewood into Marquette Park, where the sight of African Americans walking these streets ought to stand alone as a sign of progress. For it was here that Dr. King in August 1966 marched for open housing and was stoned.
But here too I find more reasons for tears.
In this Marquette Park, 45 years since Dr. King marched for freedom, just days ago, a 17-year-old pregnant mother pleading for her life was mercilessly shot by a young black gunman, reportedly three times in the heart. Doctors delivered her son post-mortem. He still fights for his life — a victim of black-on-black male violence, even before he was born.
On the street, near where his mother Charinez Jefferson was murdered, I see no justice rolling down like waters, no righteousness flowing like a mighty stream — only a river of tears and a plastic tarp that partially shields Charinez’s teddy-bear memorial from the rain.
It’s enough to make you cry, to long for the dream that was once King’s.
And I can’t help but wonder, with tears in my eyes, amid news of a 1-year-old shot in the head, “Where do we go from here?” Fountain, John W. Chicago Sun-Times. August 25, 2011.
The only place we can go to is the Lord; man has no way of solving all these problems.
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