Every year, around his birthday, people always pose the question – has the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. been realized?

Symposiums are had, conferences are facilitated, and dialog is had about this very question. Each year, the answer is the same – no. Dr. King was the very first person that we learned about during Black History Month. For a long time, he was part of an exclusive club of “safe” black figures that we could talk about in school and not have to worry about outbreaks or race riots.

 

We know that he went to Morehouse. We know that he became the youngest person to win the Nobel Peace Prize. We know he was married to Coretta Scott King – and they had children. We know he’d been to the mountaintop – and he had a dream.

In 2008, this nation saw its first African-American president. Images of Rev. Jesse Jackson crying is most memorable. Why was he crying? Surely not because he thought that his friend’s dream had been realized. Dr. King would be 82 years old today, were it not for his assassination on April 4, 1968. Since his death, African-Americans have made great advances, but the work of Dr. King and his dream – are both incomplete. The biggest evidence of this is the assumption by some, that everything is copasetic and cool.

 

 

 

Race in 2012 is a conversation that people are tired of having. It’s messy and inconvenient, and talking about it might bring up some old issues that people should be over by now. That’s what seems to be the case.

Image is everything, it forms the ideas that people have and it can create an identity that could be true or false. The thing is, it was hard to frame Dr. King as something that he wasn’t. The mainstream media that may have been in the pocket of Hoover and the FBI painted negative pictures of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Doing so was easy because of their philosophy of self-defense. And people believed it – even black people. But with Dr. King and his militant take on nonviolent practices, the media couldn’t betray him as a monster. The very cameras that followed him and other protesters saw beatings that were sustained at the hands of law enforcement.

Hoover was an architect and framer that painted pictures and then sold them to our country. But in the case of Dr. King, he had a bit of a challenge. Then, rumors and allegations of infidelity began to pop up. Dr. King a womanizer?

Dr. King wasn’t immune to the media’s framing and in 2012 blacks still deal with that framing. The media isn’t to blame. It was the ideals and lineage from what President Obama called “This nation’s original sin,” slavery. Typically, framing of blacks has aided the mainstream consensus in selling a stereotype that we have all too often purchased.

America is a in tricky situation right now. Things have changed – some for the better, some for the worst. But until we stop buying into the stereotype, dreams like Dr. King’s will remain just that – dreams.

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