Heal The Land

Heal The Land

Two years before his death, Martin Luther King wrote a book titled, Where Do We Go From Here, Chaos Or Community. In this intriguing work, Dr. King expressed great sadness that after more than a decade of the civil rights movement, blacks were worse off than they were 10 years before.  The plight of Black America today would have left him mortified.

I often wonder why 55 years after the Civil Rights Act, chaos is still what defines most black communities.  Race riots and clashes between police and protesters have been replaced with crippling gang violence; intact family units have been replaced with staggering unwed pregnancies and single mother homes; and a strong desire for jobs and business opportunities have been replaced with a malignant complacency to be cared for by a welfare state.  I believed lack of quality education, limited job opportunities or even just plain old laziness contributed to the stagnancy of black America, but then an incident from almost 30 years ago came back to mind.

My grandmother, God rest her soul, loved to watch me crochet.  One day, I surprised her with a visit to a local craft store.  When we arrived, she refused to go in.  She was convinced that “colored” people were not allowed inside and did not want to risk a confrontation.  It was 1994.  Brokenhearted by her startling reaction, it was then I realized that the mental anguish and trauma suffered by the blacks of her generation didn’t disappear with the abolishment of Jim Crow but has been tragically passed as a legacy to future generations.

Like a caged animal that has surrendered to the hopelessness of its captivity, most blacks have long surrendered to the fear, shame and humiliation of 400 years of slavery followed by another 100 years of Jim Crow, the likes of which have never been seen since the dawn of the modern age.  With the deaths of many civil rights leaders and workers during the 1950s and 1960s, blacks could not view the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts as a victory but instead as an alien concept purchased with tears and blood.  Coupled with the refusal of many local governments at the time to enforce the new civil rights laws, fear continued to dominate the psyche of the black community, manifesting itself in strange, troubling and self-destructive ways. 

There is an old saying that says, “Hurt people hurt people”.  A national dialog needs to be opened to address the deep emotional scars inflicted by the trauma of America’s history, so we can truly begin to heal the land.  Until that happens, it can only be expected that the descendants of those who withstood an unspeakably cruel institution will continue to spiral down unabatedly and remain trapped in a mental cage that is now of their own making.