Men with guns had broken down the door in a home-invasion attack on a Ross Street apartment in Wilkes-Barre. And the young black mother who lived in the same building with her two young black sons must have wondered how she could safely raise her children in such a dangerous environment.
I wondered too.
I had met her two boys one day whole raking leaves in the driveway of my South River Street home.
The neighborhood was changing for the worse.
On another day I returned home to find another young mother covered with a sheet in the middle of the street after dying in the middle of a cross-fire drug deal shoot-out. She had come to the neighborhood looking for drugs and left her two young children in the car as she went into a house. The children watched her go down in a spray of bullets and breathe her last breath in a pool of blood.
Two more young children were now walking alone through the same neighborhood.
I struck up a conversation and within minutes they were helping me create big piles of leaves, laughing and talking and working hard. Lively and inquisitive, they looked to be about 11 and six.
We had a good time.
Not long after working together as neighbors, I went to their apartment and knocked on the door. The boys’ mother asked me in and we talked briefly about the home invasion.
Then I asked her permission to allow her sons to accompany me to a Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration down the street at Wilkes University.
She granted my request and they were ready the day I stopped to pick them up.
When we entered the lobby, people I knew seemed puzzled. I had no children and they wondered about my two little friends.
I merely introduced them by name and let it go at that. They were like the rest of us – people coming together to pay tribute to King and his legacy of peace, justice and equality.
That was about 10 years ago.
I have no idea where the two brothers are today.
The apartment building has been torn down and the neighborhood is still no place to raise children. My old once-perfect home is now in a state of disrepair. Drugs and crime shape the landscape.
And the dream continues.
I hope the brothers are doing well.
But I don’t know.
I hope they vote and keep hope alive. I hope they remember the words to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and take its message to heart. I hope they are living the dream in the quest for civil rights and equality for everyone.
But I worry that they, too, have missed the dream, as have so many other young black males who struggle against continuing oppression, bigotry and discrimination in America.
I worry that they might not even be alive.
Is the oldest in the Army? Are they in jail? Are they raking leaves with their own young neighbors in a nice suburb somewhere in this land of the free?
I also think about their mother.
Where is she today? Does she have the money to have cable TV and HBO? What constitutes the Promised Land for her? On whom can she depend?
It’s too easy to believe that the fight is over, that King’s fierce battle for civil rights has a happy ending. Believing that the people of this troubled nation have achieved the dream is a dangerous delusion.
The struggle continues on all fronts.
King saw his dream turn into what he called a “nightmare.” The year before an assassin gunned him down in Memphis, he saw the fires of unrest burn in the streets of America. He felt the hatred and the fear. He heard the drumming of opposing armies shaped by people who should have been neighbors rather than enemies.
Severe inequality still permeates this land.
For too many people, the dream still isn’t working out.
The Morning News with Nancy & Kevin
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