Proactive Chronicles (Newsletter)

K.O.P.E. Remembers Slain Student

Josh Richardson: seventeen, star baseball player, soon-to-be graduate of Riverdale High School and fellow witness to perhaps the greatest advancement in American society this century will ever see, gunned down, November 8, 2008. Dream deferred. Even in the midst of celebration the thief which comes to satisfy an insatiable thirst for innocent blood showed up. Saturday, he celebrated. Josh Richardson was not the first young victim of violence whose picture and story would be flashed across our television screen. I am certain without having to check its factuality that the same story was told in Southside Chicago that same night. Not the follow-up to the media feast surrounding the Jennifer Hudson tragedy, but another young man or worse yet, sister, unrelated to a world-famous singer and relatively unknown to his/her surrounding community. Same story. Different characters.

The cynicism that locked in on the psyche of perhaps all of black America the night of the election, briefly leaving just shortly after his victory, is the same cynicism that predicts a loss before the game is even started. Being black in America has been like being a Boston Red Sox fan, only for 400 years. Now the victory of Obama has produced a new mantra in the black community, "no more excuses." But I wonder if we are subconsciously echoeing the words of liberal whites who under better, Clinton-like economic conditions, would have still taken the safe route down McCain Street and thus continuously overrode the now passive, elderly movement for civil/human rights. Had we known electing a black President was going to reenergize our efforts to raise our boys to be men and girls to be women, perhaps Dr. King's advisors should have pulled him away from lifting the spirit of blacks and speaking to the collective conscience of whites and more aggressively urged him to run for President. If having a black President was going to save our schools and the communities that surround them then perhaps the chief aim of civil rights should have been voter's rights.

The truth is the purpose of last Tuesday was to add the final check mark to a long list of Firsts. We've seen the first everything, but President. And even those milestones did little if nothing toward realizing concrete gains in our community. They did nothing to save the Josh Richardsons of the world. And as we continue to commercialize and capitalize on the Grand Dream of Dr. King, for what it's worth to most Americans (blacks included) who've never heard nor read the speech in its entirety. Had Dr. King known November 4, 2008 would mark a four-day countdown towards the end of Josh Richardson's life, who died in the least noble and triumphant way possible, he would have opted to wait another forty years to the anniversary of his death before we got our first black president.

For a reason in no way related to Obama's victory, I say, "no more excuses." I still have a dream.