‘Do you have a clue where racism started?” Kiani Bonner, 10, of Bordentown, asked this very question after a presentation of a medley of songs from the Afro- American tradition and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech Jan. 21 at a gathering to honor King at the Roosevelt municipal building.
PHOTOS BY CHRIS KELLY staff Roosevelt’s Ann Kassahun accompanies Kiani Bonner, 10, of Bordentown, in performing a song from the Afro-American tradition during a program to honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Roosevelt Municipal Building Jan. 21. The child’s inquiry prompted a lively yet cordial debate among the full audience, made up mostly of members of the Roosevelt community attending resident Robin Gould’s event.
To try to answer Kiani’s question, resident Alan Mallach said he believed the concept developed simultaneously with the first communities and civilizations. He said the first tribes often fought each other.
“Racism is a strand in human behavior,” he said. “There’s a part of humans that has to fight and we have to overcome it, even in our own heads.We have to fight it within society, culture and people.”
A group of students develop their fine motor skills during one of the many activities Jan. 16 in the prekindergarten classroom at the Roosevelt Public School. When Kiani asked Mallach if he was trying to say that racism is passed down from generation to generation, he said, “Thatmakes it all themore important that when we talk to our children and grandchildren, we don’t pass these things down.”
Resident Carol Watchler said she does not believe racism is innate.
“I don’t want to watch children walking away from this believing that,” she said.
Watchler said, “I think true prejudice, awareness of differences, and struggles came about over the attempt to control resources. This is often at the heart of prejudice and discrimination.
Roosevelt resident Michael Ticktin added that forms of discrimination such as racism and slavery often begin because “people can only get a sense of self when they can prove they are better than other people.”
T
hose among the 45
people in attendance who spoke agreed that forms of discrimination continue to exist.
Kiani’s mother, Nicicia Jenkins, said, “Whenever I hear King’s speech, I have a dream that we can get past where he’s trying to get us to.”
She said she has a sense that the human condition is currently experiencing little or no growth and attributes this to “a lack of appreciation for and understanding of the past,” as well as a lack of effort to fix the current wrongs in society against all types of people.
“It’s like the world is in a downward spiral,” she said.
To help those in attendance better understand the past, some shared memories of their encounters with racism and oppression.
Resident Ann Kassahun said that at the age of 7 she traveled from her home in Albany to the South during World War II.
“When we traveled by bus in the South, we had to be in the back of the bus,” she said. “We had to stand for 90 miles when there were empty seats in the front of the bus.”
She also recalled seeing a clerk decline selling a train ticket to a black, injured American soldier who was returning home from war along with signs that read “black” and “white.”
Resident Pearl Seligman said that even areas in the North discriminated against blacks. She said that in Hightstown in the ’30s blacks had not been allowed to walk on the side of the street with the bank. She said it was also not uncommon for whites who associated with blacks to be beaten. In addition, she said that the Hightstown movie theater had a separate section for blacks, which some Roosevelt residents often sat in to protest the discrimination.
Resident Bob Clark said one of King’s most important lessons was how “the majority does not always do the right thing.”
He continued, “Martin Luther King Jr. stood up to the majority to do the right thing at great personal risk.”
Mallach added, “In the last year or two before King died, he understood the fight was not just about the rights of African- Americans, but about fighting poverty, economic injustice and unjust wars.”
He continued, “During the last period of his life, before he was assassinated, King wanted to assemble a poor people’s campaign that would bring people of all colors and races together for economic justice.”
Borough resident Janice Fine, a professor at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations and the author of “Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream,” also spoke about disparity being an underlying cause of discrimination.
Regarding the immigration issues in New Jersey today, she said, “If you think about whatMartin Luther King would say today, he would say look below the surface of things.”
She said the world dynamics of the market place are causing people to migrate.
“People are migrating, trying to improve their lives in a world where wealth is distributed so unequally,” she said.
Fine said that the country could address disparity and its other issues by prioritizing people’s needs and then organizing communities and wealth around satisfying those needs.
Those in attendance seemed to agree that solving racial and economic injustice would take systemic change, including a revamping of the American work day, which leaves little time for family, community and other endeavors.Many there also have hopes that a new leader like King will emerge to reunite the masses and spark America’s enthusiasm for positive change.
The conversation at the municipal building was reminiscent of all that King said on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial Aug. 28, 1963, when he spoke about how the Emancipation Proclamation “came as a beacon light of hope to millions of slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice” but did not conclude the fight against injustice.
“One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination,” King said. “One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in themidst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners ofAmerican society and finds himself an exile in his own land.”
And, King called on people to remember the “fierce urgency of now.”
“This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism,” he said. “Now is the time to make the real promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise fromthe dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation fromthe quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”