Deferring Dreams....

FOR AFRICAN-AMERICANS, everything takes time. Dreams are deferred. Suffering comes quickly and lasts long, and the surcease of suffering takes time, maybe too much time. Stuffed like sardines into the cargo holds of slave ships, the trans-Atlantic voyage took weeks and months, and millions of Africans died en route, which mattered little to the enslavers, because the loss of cargo was written into the business plan, accepted as the cost of business, and did not consume enough profit to render the trade unprofitable. Slavery in the United States endured for 246 years, a very long time, one might think. It had been abolished for centuries in most other places, as early as 1066 in the mother country England, but in America, it took time. Then, their peculiar institution abolished by blood in 1865, the white American south threw a temper tantrum, and effectively reenslaved African-Americans for several more decades, segregated and cast them out of society for a hundred years, until finally, in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson sensibly asserted: "one hundred years is long enough". After, at long last, all the civil right legislation had been forced down America's throat, racism went underground, where it lingers and festers today, deeply embedded institutionally and subtly in every aspect of American culture in this, the allegedly progressive year of 2016. And now we have, at long last, the Smithsonian museum of African-american culture and history, after waiting for it for one hundred years. The idea was put forth by freed slaves and civil War veterans, and first proposed one hundred years ago, in 1916, during the presidency of a notorious racist, Woodrow Wilson. Now, at long last, the museum is open, and another dream of African-america has come true, very belatedly, like all the other dreams deferred......THANKS FOR READING!