The Dream Deferred

I finished the book a couple days ago. It wasn't nearly as hard to read as I thought it would be, but it's certainly not for everyone. It brought out some good points, but it leaves you hanging at the end. I suppose that's because it was written some 30 years ago and doesn't cover anything that happened after the 60s. On page 341 there is as good a summary of the 60s as I have ever heard. Although the significance of that decade has been passionately debated ever since, one thing on which both sides agree is that "something important went wrong". I remember the 60s as an exciting time to be alive, but I suppose that was because it was my coming of age decade. I think it was Dickens who said, "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times", but of course he wasn't talking about the 1960s. Maybe any time is like that when you're that age.

I recently sent away for a CD of Joan Baez at the Newport Folk Festival of 1968. I knew I wouldn't like it because I stopped buying her albums in 1967 when I found out that she was on the "wrong" side of the Vietnam issue. I have since learned that she had always been a pacifist but, at the time, I felt betrayed, like when Bob Dylan went electric. Anyway, I was ordering something else from a catalogue, and threw this in because they charge the same for shipping no mater how much stuff you order. Also, I thought it would do me good to hear it, since we were studying the decade, and 50 years is a long time to stay mad at somebody.

Looking back on it now, I think that all those people were sincere in their beliefs and were only doing what they thought needed to be done. The authors of our book were disappointed that the civil rights thing didn't turn out the way they wanted, but they were writing in the 1980s, and a lot of things have happened since then. I don't know if they would feel any better writing about it today. Living in God's Country, all I know about urban problems is what I read and see on TV. In some ways, it seems like nothing much has changed and, in other ways, it seems like everything has changed way too much. What do you think about that?

One point brought out in the book was that segregation is justified by its proponents because Blacks are so different than Whites. The other side of the coin is that segregation is a big reason why Blacks are so different. Being shut out of the White culture for so long has caused them to develop a culture of their own. So how do we fix this? The civil rights people believed that, if you could get Blacks and Whites to live side by side, it would draw them closer together. What they discovered was that, the more you try to force them together, the more they hate each other. Like you said, it's all about hearts and minds. It seems, though, that with all the propaganda tools at the Establishment's disposal, they could easily condition Blacks and Whites to accept each other. They certainly did it with the Gays! Any culture that can make homosexuality seem normal should be able to make anything seem normal.