Sermon by Rev. Len DeRoche

"He had a Vision," Martin Luther King Jr.

On August 28, 1963 while in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial after a triumphant march to Washington and before a crowd of two hundred and fifty thousand and before a media audience of millions Martin Luther King Jr. preached probably the most famous sermon ever preached to the American people. "I have a Dream." He was 34 years old. He had been married for ten years and had fathered four children and pastored two churches. He had completed a Ph.D. less than 8 years before. He had been arrested five times and had met with one American President and one Indian Prime Minister.

At 28 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He had been stabbed in New York City and his Alabama porch had been bombed once. He had a file started on him by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for his alleged communist sympathies and had many of his phones and rooms bugged. He had published four of his five books and had been jailed in Birmingham. Less than five years later he was dead as was that American President, John Kennedy, and many others. Yet on this August day Martin Luther King Jr. told the nation that he had a dream.

In the shadow of Lincoln he recalls Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation with words reminiscent of Lincoln's own words at Gettysburg. His dream symbolically developed the advancement of his people since they came to these shores before our puritan ancestors landed four miles from here. Martin's dream was part of the American Dream. Twenty five years later how close are we to realizing that American Dream.

In 1963 the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. In 1999 more than half of all black males between the age of 25 and 34 are jobless or underemployed. In 1993 2.3 million black men were sent to prison and 23,000 matriculated into college- this is at a ratio of a hundred to one. The ratio for white males is six to one. In assets the figures are just as grim. The poorest twenty percent of whites have a net worth of $10,000, the corresponding black group have a net worth of zero. 

In 1963 King accused the American nation of giving the black people a bad check, a check that has come back marked insufficient funds. In 1954 the Supreme Court issued its famous Brown vs. the Board of Education decision and the Little Rock schools were desegregated. Yet, in 1999, most black students attend majority black schools with a third of black students attending a school that is 90 to 100 percent black.

The statistic of black males completing of high school within these systems are appalling. Yet a recent survey by two Princeton Economists have stated that every additional year of education increased the income potential by 16 percent. Yet, in our great cities like Chicago where I lived for a year and a half the white population has left to follow the good jobs into the white suburbs. This is residential segregation. The black poor are living in uniformly disadvantaged neighborhoods. This is true in Chicago and New York and I suspect is true in Boston as well. Martin's dream of little black boys and little black girls being able to join hands with white boys and white girls can't occur when they don't live together.

These economically depressed areas lack entry-level blue color jobs- the types of jobs that become economic stepping-stones to those better jobs in better industries. In the area around the University of Chicago the most prevalent entry level jobs that could be had by the black youth that lived there was in the drug trade, this is not the drug trade like CVS, but the illegal drug trade.

I have met young men, teenage boys really, who were the bread winners for families whose only trade were drugs. Is it no wonder the rumor that the CIA had sold drugs in Los Angelos to keep the Black population down had gain such wide acceptance as truth among the black population. But currently, the largest killer of Black males between the ages of 15 and 39 is not drugs, nor automobiles, nor heart disease nor cancer, but the common handgun. Many blacks believe that the prevalence guns within Black society is a white plot to destroy their young.

Among women there has been some favorable statistics, black women now earn about the same as whites with comparable education. Yet the statistic that since 1963 there has been an increase in Black female head of families may negate this gain in any real way. Since 1963 we have seen various antipoverty programs like Johnson's Great Society, yet these federal welfare expenditures rarely amount to more than 2% of the federal budget. In 1992 welfare and food stamps cost $47 Billion. During that same year the Census Bureau stated that another $37 Billion was need to raise the incomes of all poor families with children to the poverty line. to the poverty level.

I suspect the new welfare reform going into effect today in our state will not improve this situation. Clearly King's challenge to honor the promissory note has come back for insufficient funds. Now I don't think this is only a white problem, but a black problem as well. Black leadership has not been as good as it could be. Examples like the current mayor of Washington, Marion Barry convicted of drug charges yet was returned to office, and the Rhodes Scholar Mel Reynolds, 1992 Chicago congressman was convicted of sexual misconduct and Mike Espy, the former secretary of Agriculture, come to mind.

Yet the Million Men's March on Washington, the greatest assembly of black males since King's 1963 march was not lead by a Colin Powell or a Jesse Jackson, but by a minor Minister named Louis Farrakhan. It would seem that the mighty have fallen and the fallen have become mighty. The individualism of the Reagan years have effected Blacks as well as Whites. In the past Black students attended black colleges like Howard and Morehouse as King did. Black students were sent off by their parents with the idea of helping their people are now sent to the Ivy's with the idea of cashing in their educational checks for lucrative personal jobs.

Their leadership becomes buried in corporate America and their home become the affluent homes of Suburbia. King had a dream that one day even in the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression would be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. Yet, in the past year a young black 13 year old boy was attacked with ball bats and beat senseless while riding his bike through a white community in Chicago. Martin had a dream that his "four children would one day live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

And yet in Texas within the year, that state that always prizes itself for its greatness, a black man can be dragged to his death behind a pickup truck due to color of his skin. We have not yet become that oasis Martin dreamt.

In Health Care where I worked for the last year Martin's Dream has not been consummated either. Blacks are very skeptical of the white health care industry since the Tuskegee Experiment which ended in 1972 became public knowledge. This government sponsored experiment on Black men with syphilis who went untreated for 60 years takes its toll in Black distrust of the medical profession. The line of abuses run to Sickle Cell Disease as well. Identified in 1910 there were no significant research done until the 70's. Because of the hereditary nature of the disease black's who carried the gene were told that the problem could effect their children. This was read as an attempt to limit the African American population by white leaders.

This paranoid behavior is understandable. I was told by a black Chicago women with a masters degree that the Hospital where I worked experimented on Black babies because they were poor. She was dead serious and only represented what Black people fear. As a consequence Blacks do not use the medical systems as much as whites. Between 1985 and 1992 tuberculosis among blacks increased 26%. Currently African Americans have the highest overall cancer incidence of any population in the US. African Americans have a higher rate of stroke, cirrhosis and diabetes than any other population. Is it surprising that the worst healthcare systems are located in predominately black sections of cities? Here too, Martin's dream became a bad check.

Since his march on Washington, King met a second US President at the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Norwegian King during a Nobel ceremony. He was arrested for the 12th time and marched between Selma and Montgomery, Alabama and through Chicago to integrate housing. He published his sixth book and announced a campaign against Vietnam War and poverty.

On April 3 1968 in the Memphis Masonic Temple Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech called "I've been to the mountaintop." Speaking to a black audience whose experience identifies with the Moses myth of the exodus as a myth of liberation for the black people he talked of visions from this story. He said. "We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountain top.Like everybody, I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's Will. And he's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know.that we as a people will get to the promised land." Within 24 hours Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead by James Earl Ray. Thirty years later we still seek his dream and his promised land.

In an ever evolving and never ending world. Amen.

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