African Americans still have a long way to go

Slightly more than 45 years after the historic March on Washington, the inauguration of President Barack Obama is a major down payment on the fulfillment of the dream King spoke about that day. It is as though God is saying, you may kill a few men, you may kill a few women and children, but the dream they dreamt, the truth that they stood for was too real, too right, too necessary, too noble to ever die.So we need to take a moment to thank all those who came before us who survived some of the greatest perils human beings have ever faced to emerge victorious. We have to stop and take a moment to celebrate the wonders that hands that picked cotton have manifested.

We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. Rosa Parks and Coretta King, Martin and Medgar may be gone, but we still have a work to do. Freedom is not free. Freedom is not a state; it is an act. It is a series of actions that we must all continue to take to guarantee freedom, justice, and equal opportunity in our future.

Our forerunners have done their part; now it is time for each of us to honor the great heritage of our community. We must do what they did. We must prepare ourselves and then do what we can to help build the Beloved Community, an all inclusive society based on simple justice that values the dignity and the worth of every human being.

With the election of Barack Obama, African-Americans have a reason to be proud. Too often we, as a community, focus on how we have failed. But the presidency of Barack Obama is a time for us to celebrate what we have accomplished as a people. "You who protest courageously," said Martin Luther King Jr., "and yet with dignity and..love - when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, 'There lies a great people, a Black people, who injected new meaning and dignity into the very veins of civilization.'"

It was our heritage of struggle and a lineage that pressed toward freedom that helped save America from itself and delivered us to this day. It was a people, Black people, who acted on their faith and deep spiritual conviction that helped transform an entire nation.

In the Civil Rights Movement, we were lucky. We were fortunate to be led by some of the greatest minds to ever set foot on American soil-A. Phillip Randolph, the dean of the Movement; Whitney Young, the negotiator and diplomat; Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley, masters of the legal battleground, and of course, Martin Luther King Jr., the embodiment of the non-violent call for social change.

But the Civil Rights Movement was not a movement of leaders. It was the maids and porters, wash women and butlers, farmers and sharecroppers, students and their parents--it was ordinary people with extraordinary vision, they were the marching feet who transformed this nation forever. First they prepared themselves. They studied the discipline and philosophy of non-violence. They attended trainings and mass meetings where they gained information and inspiration from leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and others. They planned their method of protest, and then they were ready to answer the call of their conscience.

Some of us were beaten. Some of us went to jail. And some of us paid the ultimate price trying to register people to vote. We lost Jimmie Lee Jackson, and four little girls one Sunday morning in Birmingham, Ala. We lost Medgar Evers and Lemuel Penn. We lost young Virgil Ware and Vernon Dahmer. And we lost our most inspired leader, Martin Luther King Jr.

Nobody knew when we were sitting down on lunch counter stools in Birmingham and Nashville. Nobody knew when lighted cigarettes were put out in our hair or down our backs. Nobody knew when we were arrested on trumped up charges and taken to jail.

Nobody knew then that today our children and grandchildren would be able to eat where they want to eat, sleep in any hotel where they want to sleep, and ride on a bus freely without fearing for their lives.

And nobody knew on March 7, 1965, when a small group of non-violent protestors made a sacred vow to walk from Selma to Montgomery. Nobody knew when some of us were left beaten and bloody on the Edmund Pettus bridge, that today the hands that picked cotton would have picked the next President of the United States.