I thought readers would enjoy the superb poem “A dead man’s dream,” by the black poet and former Kentucky legislator Carl Wendell Hines Jr.
Mr. Hines had become concerned about how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was being portrayed after his death. He felt Dr. King’s legacy defined more than a bold progressive movement, that it was a radical revolutionary movement that sought to change the underlying values of not just southern culture, of society as a whole, in a way not seen since the Civil War and Reconstruction, yet was being sacrificed for a kind of populist domestication. That the major struggles of class, race, economic exploitation, poverty, unemployment, voting rights, and freedom championed by Dr. King had been largely watered down and forgotten. That the major social and institutional structures that create and sustain the major problems and struggles of individuals, of the poor and middle class regardless of race, had been sidelined and ignored. As we know, after Dr. King was murdered by a white supremacist, much remains unfinished.
Apart from Columbus, Dr. King is the only celebrated civilian commemorated by a federal holiday and is the only American civilian so honored. Mr. Hines believed our views should not default to an incomplete, inadequate, incorrect view of Dr. King’s radical stance and achievements, and we must not forget what remains unfinished. We must acknowledge that everything depends on “we the people,” where everyone participates.
I hope readers will enjoy Mr. Hines’ exceptional poem.
“A Dead Man’s Dream” by Carl Wendell Hines Jr.
“Now that he is safely dead,
Let us praise him.
Build monuments to his glory.
Sing Hosannas to his name.
Dead men make such convenient heroes.
For they cannot rise to challenge the images
That we might fashion from their lives.
It is easier to build monuments
Than to build a better world.
So now that he is safely dead,
We, with eased consciences will
Teach our children that he was a great man,
Knowing that the cause for which he
Lived is still a cause
And the dream for which he died is still a dream.
A dead man’s dream.”
Stephen Cipot
Garden City Park
