The Dream Realized

"To dismiss the magnitude of this progress, to suggest as some sometimes do that little has changed, that dishonours the courage and the sacrifice of those who paid the price to march in those years. But we would dishonour those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is somehow complete.
"The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice but it doesn't bend on its own. To secure the gains this country has made requires constant vigilance, not complacency.
"Because they kept marching, America changed. Because they marched, the civil rights law was passed. Because they marched, the voting rights law was signed. Because they marched, doors of opportunity and education swung open so their daughters and sons could finally imagine a life for themselves beyond washing somebody else's laundry or shining somebody else's shoes."
U.S. President Barack Obama

Ceremony: Obama watches on as members of Martin Luther King Jr's family ring a bell beneath the Lincoln Memorial during the ceremony

Standing at the Lincoln Memorial, before the image of the very man whose vision of an end to slavery in America created a national upheaval in a bloody, fierce civil war, the black man who is the inheritor of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream spoke movingly of what he knows very well. With him, the King family, and with them former presidents of the United States.

In a strangely partisan show of unity. But one has to ask what kind of unity is it when American blacks celebrate their equality and the two major political parties of the country mutually exclude one another? Where were the Republican presidents to join with the Democratic presidents? It was not solely Democrats who supported Martin Luther King's vision in the final analysis, but Republican ones as well.

President Obama's immediate predecessor was responsible for elevating blacks to positions of elite political administrative authority during his lengthy presidency; Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, for example. The sad and sorry spectacle of the memorial presenting as a unitary political event speaks ill of the organizers, the current administration and the party he represents.

President Obama himself spoke disparagingly of his political opponents at a time when there should have been a memorial session of a great American historical event to bring them together in unity of purpose. Speaking of them as those who "practise the old politics of division". In fact, there is division aplenty within the black community itself. The division of the social elite, the black aristocracy and achievers, and the greater unwashed community of the rudely ungroomed, social failures.

And the culture that unites them, black celebrity figures in entertainment, politics, sports and society and rap with its sexist, racist, criminal clever asides. Black America has its black comics, actors, singers, television personalities and intellectuals of note. And it has its shadowy, sorry criminal class of dope dealers and gangs, preying on one another and causing social unrest and misery among their own. A culture of single mothers, absent fathers, poverty and children abandoned to fate.

A one-time community organizer and briefly state senator is now the towering figure of president of the United States of America. There is pride in the black community; the ultimate has been achieved. But has it? The figure of commanding authority is there, but has that made any difference whatever to the status of black youth intent on gangs, drugs, guns and criminal activities? A crime rate that continues and continues to prey on its own?

An event that overtook history and made America giddy with the prospects of its own racial freedom, salvation from the history that so shamed them. And so impressing the international community that nothing seemed impossible And because nothing seemed impossible the Nobel Peace prize was awarded rather precipitously to someone who had distinguished himself by nothing more than high-flown rhetoric, promising that element that resides deep in the emotional hearts of all of humankind; 'hope'.

Crowds: Tens of thousands of spectators watch President Obama speak at the service marking 50 years since the iconic address

The audacity of his vision so enthralled his people, the electorate, the nation and the global community that he towered well above the office he held. He has since floated back to ground, his once-ebony hair grey, the global problems laid at his office door too numerous to count, his decisions uncertain, their outcomes problematical.

And the world continues to spin on its axis.