Waking From the Dream

  Kids today learn about the Civil Rights movement, but what happened after Dr. King’s assassination in ’68? The rest of it is usually absent from high school history books, and with good reason. It wasn’t an upbeat age anymore. It was tragic.

    Right after Dr. King was killed, the Civil Rights movement splintered and never recovered. Jesse Jackson and Amiri Baraka stole the spotlight, and Coretta Scott King didn’t trust either of them. Dr. King’s last accomplishment, a law against housing discrimination, couldn’t end segregation. It continued (famously) in Chicago, as well as in the Bronx, LA, Florida, and New York State. There was still plenty of work to be done, not just with equal rights, but also with poverty, drug use, teenage pregnancy, and traumatized Vietnam veterans. Jackson and Baraka focused all efforts on their own agenda at the expense of these things. Social problems were not dealt with, and they all got worse in the 1980’s. Take Detroit for example; her problems could never be cured by laws alone.

    Waking From the Dream pulls no punches in its criticism of “liberals.” One example it uses is the debate over whether to make Dr. King’s birthday a national holiday. Ted Kennedy said yes, Jesse Helms said no. Okay, I know we don’t expect much from Jesse Helms, but you can’t call him stupid. He pointed out that Ted, and his brothers John and Bob, ordered the FBI to spy on Dr. King. Helms felt no obligation to please anyone, and his judgment wasn’t clouded by political correctness, so he saw right through the phony liberals. He pitted the “limousine liberals” against black radicals, and just as he expected, nothing got done. Kind of reminds you of the 2014 government shut down, doesn’t it?

    You won’t find any political correctness in this book. It’s more sympathetic to white southern conservatives than it is toward the left. If you watch the documentary Eyes On the Prize you’ll see the same thing; the movement got lost in the 1970’s, and you wonder what’s been going on in the 27 years since that documentary aired. Perhaps I should quote something Bill Cosby said in one of his “call outs” back in 2006; “when the movement was over, we started partying too soon.”

    It was the same thing with the Obama election. When he won, the country partied, and the next morning woke up with a hangover. All we can hear now are the cries of the poor. Thanks to foreclosures, the rest of the land is going silent.