‘I have a dream’ at 50: what has changed in Atlanta?

Yanga Nkruma would be a great poet, if he wasn’t so busy being a Panther.

“Gunshots and sirens are the lullabies by which our babies go to sleep at night,” he says, as we walk through a crime-ridden Atlanta neighbourhood at dusk.

There is urgency in his voice; his observations and exhortations are delivered almost with the rhythm and cadance of rap. He’s taken me to an area that’s on the wrong side of the tracks, in a city where children born into poverty have statistically less chance of escaping it than anywhere else in America. Martin Luther King Jr.’s home town.

I think if he saw conditions today his heart would break. His message has been corrupted – Yanga Nkruma, Black Panther

House after house is boarded up. A fight breaks out at the bottom of the street; raised voices. We stop and watch, unsure whether to walk on down. A car screeches away, crickets strike up a chorus and the stillness of this desolate street returns; a police car crawls past, down on the main road.

“These places are crack dens,” Mr Nkruma tells me, gesturing to yet another derelict home. “They’re where people get snatched and raped. They’re infested: infested with rats, cockroaches, drugs and hate. Three guys were shot here last week.”

‘Nothing’s changed’

Yanga Nkruma’s refrain? “Nothing’s changed.” Nothing’s changed since 1963, he means, when local pastor Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his own poetic exhortation for change. In Atlanta, they were two words I would hear over and over again.

Dr King’s goosebump oratory, decrying the “shameful condition” by which African-Americans were “still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination” – a century after the emancipation of the slaves – resonates down through five decades.

I’m still walking up the hill beside Mr Nkruma, who grew up in a Black Panther household and wears his indignation, his anger, like a birthright.

“This is a ghetto, yeah. We still have neighbourhoods that are forcibly segregated,” he says. His New Black Panther Party is pretty small; it has been branded a racist hate group by other civil rights organisations.

What would MLK have made of his hometown if he were still around? Everyone here knows Atlanta’s most illustrious son by those three famous letters. “I think if he saw conditions today his heart would break,” says Mr Nkruma. “His message has been corrupted.”

He does not share MLK’s dream. For him it did not go nearly far enough.

From the balcony of one of the few lived-in houses, a woman shouts down to us: “What y’all doing here?” Mr Nkruma explains: “Just telling the world, sister.” I call up to her: “What about for you? Have things got better since MLK?”

“Gotten worse,” she yells back. “Much worse.”

Inequalities remain

I’d been poring over the statistics, and even if she hadn’t been speaking just of her personal situation, the woman on the balcony was right.

Unemployment figures, by race, haven’t changed at all since 1963. Nearly a quarter of young black Americans aged 20 to 24 are today out of work.

And although some things have got better for African-Americans (there are three times as many of them in college than there were back then), the opportunity gap has in many cases widened.

He inspired me tremendously: even though I am a black man, I am equal and should have same rights as any American – Calvin C. Johnson Jr.

Here’s a startling fact: the average wealth of a black family, the head of which graduated from college, is less than the average wealth of a white family, the head of which dropped out of high school.

And generally, the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black ones.

Eight per cent of the black population has lost the right to vote because they’ve been convicted of a crime. And it’s in America’s criminal justice system where you find the most shocking inequality: one in every three black men in America can expect to be in prison during his lifetime.

An African-American male is six times more likely to end up in jail than a white American. Fifty years ago, it was five times more likely – it has indeed “gotten worse”.

Racial injustice

The day after I met Mr Nkruma, the angry Panther, I spent an afternoon with Calvin C. Johnson Jr., a black man who spent 16 years in jail for a crime he never committed. We contacted him through the Innocence Project, which, among other things, looks after the interests of a long list of men, just like Mr Johnson. They call them “The Exonerees.”

With the words of Bob Dylan’s ballad Hurricane about the boxer Rubin Carter – America’s most famous victim of racial injustice – running through my mind, Mr Johnson told me his extraordinary story.

Unlike Mr Nkruma though, Mr Johnson is not bitter. He still indignant about the way in which he believes America’s criminal justice system is weighted against black people. But after all he’s been through – the shame, the suffering and the waste of his best years – Mr Johnson does not bear a grudge against the white folk who stole 16 years of his life and never said sorry.

He too sounds poetic when he talks. Especially when I ask him about what MLK means to him. There was a big picture of his fellow Atlantan hanging prominently in his living room – alongside one of Barack Obama.

“His message gave me inspiration,” says Mr Johnson. “He inspired me tremendously: even though I am a black man, I am equal and should have same rights as any American. It allowed me to continue to struggle, to attain my freedom, through his inspiration.”

For many millions of African-Americans, MLK’s dream is still a dream. To some, the very notion of “equality” with their white fellow-Americans is so far-fetched as to be fantasy.

But 50 years ago today, Dr King exhorted a previous generation to go back to their slums and ghettos, “knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair,” he said.

Sadly though, it’s a message of hope as fresh and relevant to African-Americans today as it was then.

April 1968: Mourners wait for Dr Martin Luther King’s funeral cortege to pass in Atlanta, Georgia