MLK - Boulevard of Broken Screams

Found back in the vaults:

A lot of people know the comedian Chris Rock's joke about the Martin Luther King Boulevards that inevitably seem to run through the worst part of whatever city's ghetto where they've changed the street signs and little else.
In the joke, a friend who's lost calls Rock and says he's on Martin Luther King Boulevard, and what should he do? "Run!" shouts Rock.
This week was the 40th anniversary of MLK's death, and TV obligingly played clips from the civil rights movement in the South. No diminishing this man's accomplishments and the role he played in finally desegregating the South: he is truly up there with Gandhi in actually living the philosophy of non-violent resistance. His legacy brought the South into the 20th century, and a nation closer to its ideals of freedom and justice for all.
But:
It sometimes seems that King is white America's token Negro. His memory is invoked constantly by the media, who rightly believe that King speaks to our best selves as a nation. However, it often seems like there were no other black men of consequence in American history or society.
No W.E.B Dubois. No Frederick Douglass. No Marcus Garvey. No Richard Wright (author of Invisible Man) or Langston Hughes. And certainly no Black Panthers or Eldridge Cleaver ("Soul on Ice").
This generation of ghetto youth seem to care little of civil rights icons or anyone else but the present of rap, sports, and movie stars. In Washington, everyone has long gotten over the terrible irony of teenagers shooting each other at the corner of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X Boulevards in the Anacostia section of the city.
To today's inner-city youth, who are Malcolm X and MLK but some old guys in a distant, black-and-white TV past who dressed in coat and tie, like a white businessman? What do they matter when one is constantly in fear of lethal violence?
King himself had problems relating to young ghetto black men when he came up to Chicago for a 1968 march that featured bottle-throwing white youths telling him to go home. They didn't want to integrate with what they saw as ghetto dysfunction: drugs, crime, random violence etc.
Northern black youths were already so disaffected that Malcolm X at his most radical, if anyone, appeared to be a better fit to them.
So the second part of King's dream, for a society of economic equals, has never been realized. Young inner city black males have never been brought into the mainstream, both culturally and economically. There is hope that an Obama presidency would have the moral high-ground to finally begin to address the nation's biggest social problem. However, the mere presence of a black president would do little to to convince those in gangs and protecting their turf with weapons to throw them down.
Constantly invoking a civil-rights icon like King is not likely to do anything for them either. Society needs to make some tough decisions, like banning most handgun sales (rifles and other weapons permitted because they can protect a homeowners property and are difficult to conceal).
It also needs some kind of program for those without a high-school education, to open up pathways to economic independence, independent from the drug trade. My mother always said that public policy should imitate what rich people do, since they have the financial freedom to do exactly what they want. In the case of ghetto teens, that would mean sending them away to a prep school, just like the rich. These institutions would have to have strict controls, because otherwise they would become simply juvenile halls, with all the intimidation, gangs, and violence that these teens are supposedly getting away from. A few demonstration programs in the 1960's during the summers became basically that and were quickly de-funded.
Just a suggestion.







....you might see me, as a tour guide in New York, Washington, and Philadelphia. Take a sometimes twisted ride through these three cities and elsewhere. Life in the Northeast Corridor at the turn of the century, complete with observations on the serious, the idiotic and the mind-numbingly mundane. Plus excruciating naval-gazing and suicidal tendencies (read my blog or I'll kill myself).
So climb aboard, and mind your head.