What Became of America?

“The centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…” (W.B. Yeats)

Toward the climax of his “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., envisioned an America in which “my four children will no longer by judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Like Abraham Lincoln, in the debates over slavery, MLK made his case based on the promise of America’s foundational document, the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

That dream is aspirational, incapable of being fully realized in any human society. But America has come a long way since 1963. A black man was twice elected president, and a black woman born in Birmingham served as secretary of state and national security advisor. South Carolina, the heart of the Confederacy and hotbed of secession, today has a black senator, and twice elected a dark-skinned woman of Indian descent as governor.

And, as the reaction to the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer makes clear, a black man can no longer be killed with impunity anywhere in the United States.