Heal The People

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.

More than 55 years after the Civil Rights Act, chaos is still what defines America’s race relations. Clashes between police and the black community along with crippling gang violence, staggering unwed pregnancies/single mother homes and a malignant complacency to be cared for by a welfare state is now the order of the day. Lack of quality education, limited job opportunities or even just plain old laziness were believed to be the culprits that contributed to the stagnancy of black America, but something more insidious is at work here.

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. That 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 the trauma of slavery and Jim Crow. 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 a tenuous concept purchased with tears and blood. With the refusal of many local governments at the time to enforce the new civil rights laws, fear dominated 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 of blacks caused by the trauma of America’s history, before true healing can begin. Until that happens, the descendants of those who withstood an unspeakably cruel, inhumane institution will continue to spiral downward and remain trapped in a mental cage that in some ways is now of their own making.