The City of San Antonio's Martin Luther King Jr. March is always a fun event to attend. This year the keynote speaker was Brother Roland Martin. This is one of the few times a year you can actually see how big of a minority, and more specifically African-American, population there is in San Antonio. This event is the biggest march in the United States with more than 300K people showing up for a cause. This march marked the 50th Anniversary since the City of San Antonio held its first Martin Luther King Jr. March. It's the pinnacle of Dream Week in the City.
My company doesn't have MLK Day as a company holiday, but I was able through a work program to come for the march without taking time off. When you come to the event, there are people making impassioned speeches for change and gospel choirs singing. I was able to find my fraternity brothers and march with them. Brother Martin Luther King Jr. is one of our prominent members so it is always nice to march with them. There are numbered markers in the beginning of the March so it's easier to find your group.
The march starts on MLK Drive and ends on Iowa in front of the black alumni Greek row, most of them host barbecues but across street at the park, there are also many vendors for food and various items. The march is proximately 2.75 miles so bring comfortable shoes.
The slogan of this years march was is "Equity, Love, Diversity, Unity, and Social Justice." I'm not sure how I feel that King's message has been watered down for the masses. His dream still has not been fulfilled for the group his messages were intended for. African-Americans still have the highest poverty rates, are still arrested and incarcerated at higher rates, unemployment rates are the highest, and the wage and educational gap is still astronomical. I like that part of his messages are ubiquitous to other groups plights for social change, but I wish we would also still focus on the group he wanted change for.
I'm not sure how King would feel today on how his message is being used today. His message wasn't one of equality but more of equity. America will never come to terms with its slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow past with today's message of equality. Equality helped to bring about the modern day high incarceration rate, gerrymandering, large black unemployment rate, and gentrification. In today's America you need money to lobby for change. You can't address those problems without addressing the wealth gap, which King's later speeches focused on.
We live in a country that blacks are being pushed out of the inner city, that white flight left them, and now they are coming back from the suburbs to gentrify the area they neglected while black people occupied. Kaepernick couldn't kneel for racial equality without losing his job. Black Lives Matter is deemed a hate group by the US government, just like the KKK, even though they do not have a history of killing and torturing others like the Klan.
What does it mean when we live in the richest country the world has ever known but black people are drinking lead water that government officials knew about? Or that black elementary children in Baltimore don't have heaters in their classrooms during the winter or black elementary children don't have air conditioning in their classrooms during the summer in Dallas? Or that the median net worth of African-Americans families is 9K (according to US census), the lowest racial group, while White wealth is 103K? Or that the Us government gave away land to white immigrants, built land grand colleges to teach them how to farm that land, created housing and work policies that allowed for segregation and the consolidation of wealth for whites, created the GI bill to help educate WWII veterans while excluding mostly blacks, but our current politicians are telling African-Americans to pick themselves up like their grandparents did? What does it mean when the biggest beneficiary for affirmative action wasn't black Americans, who it was meant for, but white women?
So if you come to the March, remember the group MLK advocated for and march for equity and not equality, you will never feel equal if you ask for anything less. read more