September 02, 2003

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?: We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.

We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "for whites only." We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

...

Go back to Mississippi; go back to Alabama; go back to Louisiana; go back to the slums and ghettos of the northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can, and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

So I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed - we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I moved to Atlanta with a certain vision of it that I have found to be in stark contrast to its realities. I grew up in a city in Georgia that was close enough to Atlanta to feel its modernizing influence in many ways, and I grew up wanting to move to the big city. My limited experience with it growing up was either through the study of civil-rights history or through personal experience. Our few trips to Atlanta left me with the impression that all kinds of people lived there; that it was the melting pot that I had imagined.

After living here for the last few months I have found that Atlanta is as bad or worse in terms of residential segregation compared with other areas that I expected to be behind the times such as Columbia, SC. I lived in a northern Georgia county, which I jokingly refer to as land of the white people because of its 4% minority population. Atlanta is just like everywhere else, the whites live on one side of town and the blacks live on the other.

Atlanta in some ways is worse than other places because it pretends to be modern; it stands up when people ask what city will lead race relations in the next century. Even though there are many rich, successful black men and women in Atlanta, in my suburban life I don't see or hear about any of them - they live to my south.

September 2, 2003 02:45 PM