A Letter to My Country

I’ve been to the mountaintop . . . and I’ve seen the promised land.

--Martin Luther King Jr.

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We African Americans, no matter how stable or infirm the national circumstance, have always kept our eyes, our hopes and our grip firmly on the Bill of Rights. It is our passport, our spiritual identity, our right to occupancy, our legal document of last resort--welcomed or not. For America, our Step-Motherland, has always held us less dear than all the rest--something less than love-hate, but certainly more than bittersweet, has always stood between us. Still we are, by nature, God and law, a free people too; our rights, by struggle bred, as constitutionally deep as all the rest. The trouble is, though free, we are not equal. And so we often spend the midnight waiting for the other shoe to drop.

My people and I, good or bad, small or large, by ignorance and jealousy still detained. Too many blacks still quarantined in the staging area just outside the mainstream. Can we come in? Or will you be always needing an underdog to complement your ethnic self-importance?

I hope not; I think not; but dawn is almost over, and time is running out. Racial profiles, our blood-bought right to vote (trashed in Florida), Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima--and how many more must Texas drag behind the cruel velocity of her contempt? Two hundred years and more, and you still doubt the loyalty of our citizenship?

Name me one war, one campaign, one battle fought in the name of freedom where we said no.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. You hold--you say--these truths to be self-evident? Well, so do we. But cowardice, in the name of Jesus Christ, is not patriotism, and turning the other cheek is no longer an option we set before our children; we have become too American for that.

Lest we forget, what brought us here in the first place is not what brought you here. But we can modify the evil consequences. There is a basic good--projected and protected by the law--that America expects from all her patron lovers. But much depends on how we see--and where we set--the Promised Land.

The same Promised Land that Martin saw, and they killed him for it. But not before he took us all to the mountaintop, showed us the future just on the other side and guaranteed that some day we’d have possession too. But how long, Martin, how long?

Yes, Martin, on that last night in Memphis, with the politics of his clairvoyance, made the future much surer than the past. And so, in spite of the present haze and clouds of doubts and dragging feet, of hearty camouflage, smiling, but cold of hand, and saying, “No! I still discern the promise of America.”

And still remain a much committed man. So, standing before you now, where Martin stood I say to you in a raised voice: Tear down this wall! We are the mirror where America reads the health of all her principles. Our welfare is the test of this democracy. Or do you see us still the great American bane and afterthought? Does our history, in spite of Martin, still call in secret smirks and winks behind our backs for white and colored drinking fountains?

This subtle barricade between us, whatever it becomes, may yet see the break-up of this nation. Tear it down. Surely, if either of us could have built this thing we call America without the other’s help, we would have done it long ago. The stone that holds us back and weighs us down requires a push from both our hands. Tear it down! This Bill of Rights, this holy orchestration, cannot be played if half the instruments choose to remain tone-deaf.

Then let us build America together, the people’s one beloved and sure defense, ours as well as yours, shared equally among us all.

Like water fits the swimmer, like breathing fits the lungs, like seeing fits as far as the eye can see.

One nation, indivisible, at long, at last, America.