I Have a Dream Redo:

August 28, 1963 Martin Luther King speaks at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Some 45 years later to the day Barak Obama accepts the nomination of the Democratic Party as the nominee for President of the United States of America. These two events are related.

The whole issue of race relations in America is fraught with difficulty and emotion. When the 55 sage men met in Philadelphia in 1787 to design the American Constitution the issue of slavery was in fact not resolved but rather deferred. For the sake of population counting slaves were counted as 3/5 of a citizen. But additional restrictions were imposed. Congress was forbidden from prohibiting importation of slaves for the following 20 years. A “person held to service of labor” in one state be “delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor shall be due”.

Congress did in fact forbid the importation of slaves in 1807 some 20 years after ratification. However this was more of a concession to Great Britain who had outlawed slavery on March 25, 1807 by Act of Parliament. While the importation of slaves from Africa was forbidden no attempt was made to abolish slavery by either Great Britain or the United States.

The struggle continued throughout the years leading up to the American Civil War. In 1850 the Fugitive Slave Law required individuals to return fugitive slaves to their owners. The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision by the Supreme Court further divided the nation. It 1857 Chief Justice Taney read the majority opinion that stripped all slaves of any and all protections of the law. On October 16, 1859 John Brown a radical abolitionist lead 22 men in a raid on the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. The plan was to use the captured weapons to arm slaves in the American South. It is interesting to note that Robert E. Lee led the federal troops retook the Arsenal.

By two executive orders issued by President Abraham Lincoln freed all slaves in states that did not rejoin the union by January 1, 1863. This order did not free the slaves in the border states of Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia. Several acts of congress and the second part of the executive order and the Dred Scott decision was effectively reversed.

However Sothern Blacks had 100 more years of slavery by another name to endure. Jim Crow laws and warrantless arrests and total disregard of habeas corpus coupled with the KKK enforced the re-enslavement of southern blacks. In fact until Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 black America was not free. LBJ well knew that his signing of that act would in fact cost the Democratic Party their power in the South. Today the Democratic south remains almost totally Republican. So much so that only in northern Virginia and areas around Atlanta and Dade County Florida can a Democrat stand a chance of being elected.

The dream lives on. The struggle for the laboring worker vs. the corporate owners continues. Those who are without medical coverage continue to work and hope that they do not fall victim to an accident or illness. The ranks of those who cannot afford to purchase a home or who have purchased a home only to lose it to a foreclosure swells week by week. Compounding these problems is a rapidly increasing rate of inflation. These are the problems that try the souls of the American Common Man.

Against this troubled backdrop we have the vision of a Black man who has overcome all obstacles to become the first Black to be nominated for President of the United States of America by a major party. May god bless America Black, White and Brown.