Miami Prepares for
2013 March on Washington with a March of its Own
Story & Photos by José Pérez
As the historic milestone commerating the 50th
anniversary of the March on Washington dawns in just days, leaders in Miami
gathered to stage a pre-march against the backdrop of evidence that little has
changed for Black America since 1963.
Dr Reverend Carl Johnson, pastor of the 93rd
Street Community Baptist Church which hosted the event, declared during the
opening prayer for marchers that “we march for justice, jobs, peace, and
freedom. Symbolically, we’re marching to tumble down walls.”
State Representative Cynthia Stafford acknowledged the
contributions of people who participated in the 1963 march. “You were marching for me when you marched
for jobs, justice, and freedom.”
The march participants, who numbered approximately 200
people, began the procession with those at the front of the group singing “We’ve
Come this Far by Faith” while only murmurs , good-natured laughs and Sunday
morning gossip cascaded over the shuffle of feet at the rear. The marchers paraded past abandoned houses
and empty lots that dotted the landscape amidst proud houses and manicured
lawns in North Central Miami-Dade County, many holding open umbrellas for
relief from the strong August sun that was beating down upon them, some in their
Sunday best, others in t-shirts and shorts, but all moving forward.
Goodwill Ambassadors from Miami-Dade County were passing
out water at stations along the way to provide some relief for participants on
a humid morning.
Also, PICO United Florida hosted a community prayer and
march at Greater Bethel AME Church in
Overtown this week. The event at Greater
Bethel was a bon voyage ceremony for a tour that is scheduled to make stops and
hold similar events along the way to Washington, DC in Sanford and Orlando, Florida,
Atlanta and Durham, North Carolina. The
bus tour en route to this week’s March on Washington also pledged calling
attention to ongoing civil rights and economic troubles for minorities in the
United States.
Activist Ron Fulton, an uncle of the slain Miami Gardens
teenager Trayvon Martin, participated in the march at the 93rd
Street Baptist Church to fulfill a promise. “I made a commitment a long time ago to do
everything I can do to bring equal and fairness to our justice system and our
community. I’m hoping that this will be
the start of civil rights and economic change.”
Speaking of the large divide between what he called the
“haves and have nots,” Fulton expressed concern over possible backlash to any
change that may come from entrenched sectors of the country. “It’s already
dangerous because certain people don’t want to change.”
Algernon Austin, a researcher for the Economic Policy
Institute, published figures that lends credence to Fulton’s statements. Those
figures are sobering.
Austin found that almost 50% of “poor black children live
in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty.”
Additionally, wrote Austin, the same relative percentage
of black grade school students (approximately 75%) attend “majority black
schools” today as they did over forty years earlier. Most of these de facto segregated schools are
not on equal footing in terms of resources as schools with a majority of white
students.
Austin’s research
also revealed that unemployment figures for both blacks and whites have gone
virtually unchanged since 1963, hovering at a 2 to 1 ratio. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) study
also showed that the 2012 jobless rate for blacks (14%) is higher than the
unemployment rate for the entire United States during the Great Depression
(13%).
But having a job has not necessarily been good news
either. Austin’s work looked at how the
past half century has not shown improvement for black workers in lower paying
jobs. The EPI report found that “after
adjusting for inflation, the minimum wage today—$7.25—is worth $2.00 less than
in 1968, and is nowhere close to a living wage.”
Signe-Mary McKernan and Caroline Ratcliffe of the Urban
Institute found that “the average wealth of white families was $230,000 higher
than the average wealth of black and Hispanic families in 1983. This gap grew
to over $500,000 by 2010.”
It was in this context that the march was held in Miami as a
precursor for the main celebration of the important civil rights milestone in Washington, D.C.
Miami-Dade County Commissioner Audrey Edmonson and others
pointed out that there are still battles to fight to achieve true equality and
justice in the United States. “We still
need to fight and get together.”
Melonie Burke, a representative for Edmonson’s colleague
on the Miami-Dade County Board of Commissioners, Jean Monestime, echoed that
sentiment. “It doesn’t stop.”
State Senator Dwight Bullard made the drive up from his
home district in South Dade to join the rally held in front of 93rd
Street Community Baptist Church and offered contextual perspective. “Let’s understand what we’re doing here. We represent the manifestation of that dream
so our commitment is to understand that our job is not done.”
Those comments about what Stafford referred to as a
“dream deferred,” borrowing from poet Lorraine Hansberry, harkened back to the
almost prophetic analysis of the 1963 march by Malcolm X. In
writing in his autobiography about the event and describing self-serving individuals within the black community at the
time (“the status seeker”) and the machinations of insincere whites in power at
that time, X said somberly that “the black masses in America were--and still
are--having a nightmare.”
This weekend in Washington, D.C. marks a second chance
for the leaders and people of the United States to get it right and realize the
dream made famous by Martin Luther King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
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