Did Martin Luther King’s dream come true?
Steps back and forth from Martin Luther King's historic and immortal "I have a dream" speech delivered sixty years ago in front of 250,000 people marching for civil rights. Federico Guiglia's notebook
Sixty years have passed since Martin Luther King's historic speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and 250,000 people marching for civil rights. And yet, not even our global and digital society that erases everything at supersonic speed can forget that unforgettable phrase, "I have a dream", with which on August 28, 1963 the quiet revolutionary, Gandhi-like, and US Protestant pastor it sculpted the cry of pain of an America determined to fight the injustice and discrimination suffered by the black community.
Destiny would have it that, in the same hours of celebration of a message full of hope and poetry, which is the strongest political weapon (so much so that those words have changed the world, and not just the United States), the racial hatred resurfaced in Florida in the worst possible way. Using a gun branded with a swastika, a 20-year-old white man entered a store to shoot and kill a woman and two black men, before killing himself after claiming the right to hate and murder.
The brutal coincidence, which moreover represents only the latest episode in a chain of racist violence in the homeland of Martin Luther King himself, victim of the same criminal hatred on April 4, 1968, raises a question beyond all boundaries: that dream did he win or did he lose?
News events would authorize pessimism: how can such a repugnant resentment based on the most despicable prejudice, the color of the skin, still be cultivated?
But the America that today mourns three innocent people murdered by hatred, and that regrets an apparently unfulfilled dream, is the same nation that twice in a row elected Barack Obama president. As a supreme testimony that in that country, although full of contradictions and violence, nothing is barred to anyone anymore: Martin Luther King's dream has come true even inside the White House. Who would have thought it, on August 28, 1963?
No gunshots, neither today nor ever, no proclamation of rancor either in America or in Europe grappling with an immigration without controls that arouses fear and controversy ("regular entries in large numbers, respect for diversity", he asked not by chance the head of state, Sergio Mattarella), can kill the meaning of those important and happy words.
Sixty years later, dreams don't die at dawn.
(Published in L'Arena di Verona, Il Giornale di Vicenza and Bresciaoggi)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/il-sogno-di-martin-luther-king-si-e-realizzato/ on Sat, 02 Sep 2023 06:03:16 +0000.