USA

Indymedia: 40 YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS
speech writ. 8/13/03] Copyright 2003, Mumia Abu-Jamal, M.A.

It's been 40 long years since the much-heralded "March on Washington." Almost 1/2 a century -- and what is our condition today?

Our communities are ravaged from crumbling poverty, crumbling schools, bumbling politicians and brutal cops. Our culture has been ghettoized by increased corporate exploitation and the destruction of a sense of community. While hip-hoppers sing of play gangstas, the State engages in legalized gangsterism against Black folks.

At the very time that Rev. Martin King was making a speech about his Dream in Washington, the FBI was waging a secret war against Rev. King and anybody else who questioned the status quo. Within weeks of his speech, FBI agents were plotting how to place a good-looking woman in his offices to lure him into a sex scandal. In Jan. 1964, the FBI's #2 man, William Sullivan announced, "We regard Martin Luther King as *the most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country."* They tried to find a "safe" Negro leader to "replace" him; for they saw him as too 'radical.' 4 years later and he would be gone.

Rev. King perhaps dreamed of many things as he tried to peer into America's future, but I doubt he foresaw the grim reality that we live in now; I doubt he saw this dark, cheapened future that is bleaker than "Blade Runner" for millions of black youth; who are barely tolerated, if they are lucky; and all but ignored as they are shuttled into stationary slave ships (prisons) where ignorance and racism is the rule; brutality and hopelessness the norm; and where, thanx to the 'good brotha', Bill Clinton (who someone called the 1st Black president!) education is, under his 1994 Crime Bill, virtually illegal!

"CHECK IT"