On the last day of school, my fifth-grade teacher gave each of her students a small pebble with an adjective written on it in colorful sharpie that, she thought, fittingly described each child. I still have my pebble. To this day, in faded purple, all-caps lettering, the word OPTIMISTIC remains on an opaque marble stone in my bedroom. Yet, for reasons related to race and spirituality, to history and the present moment, I feel as if this adjective no longer accurately describes who I am. Paradoxically, the catalyst for this change was a hopeful, defiant ecumenical Protestant worship service in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was here where the rallying cry and central hymn of the Civil Rights Movement, “We Shall Overcome,” struck a hollow chord in my previously optimistic heart.
I was born on the twenty-eighth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Maybe this is a fitting, pseudo-religious coincidence that explains my present hopelessness. Nevertheless, on the day before he died, Dr. King was anything but hopeless. He gave his immortal “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech on April 3, 1968 during the Memphis Sanitation Strike. The parting words of King reflect an interesting truth about the Civil Rights Movement, and perhaps about all successful movements: they express hope in the face of immediate destruction. Dr. King says:
"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"
His words perhaps betray a fear of the growing number of threats against his life, but also optimism about the legacy and successes of the Civil Rights Movement that will live on regardless of his presence.
I wish I could say I share the same hope about the situation of black people in America. But I grew up in what has now been described as the worst city for black people to live in the United States: Erie, Pennsylvania. Even if Erie, a small post-industrial Rust Belt town snug on the shores of the eponymous Great Lake, isn’t the worst city for black Americans, it is surely not the promised land Dr. King prophesied. The inequalities, segregation, poverty, and harrowing violence do nothing to give me hope. The silence of our mayor on effectively being honored as the worst mayor for black people in the country does nothing to give me hope. The failure of the Department of Justice to charge the Erie Police Department in the brutal arrest of an Erie resident, Montrice Bolden, does nothing to give me hope. In short, the reign of white supremacy retains its visceral hegemony over black bodies, decades after the Civil Rights Movement.
Because of this, I have come to ascribe to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ understanding of hope in that “a writer wedded to ‘hope’ is ultimately divorced from ‘truth.’” The history of white supremacy is a living history, and it is anything but hopeful. To be hopeful about race in America is to see a mirage of the promised land in the dearth of Nineveh. Yet, I can’t just call a spade a spade like Coates and leave it at that. I depart from Coates’ view in so far as my lack of hope is not complimented by a lack of faith. My religiosity has in some way transformed and retained the optimism of my youth, after all.
I think the hopeful optimism of my fifth-grade self has since evolved into something much more fundamental; something closer to rugged perseverance than blind hope. This something is what I call “faith.” William James described it as a “a stimulus, an excitement, a faith, a force that re-infuses the positive willingness to live, even in the full presence of the evil perceptions that erewhile made life seem unbearable.” And so, while I don’t see America as the promised land Dr. King envisioned, I nonetheless retain an excitement, stirred by faith in the divine, that defies and challenges the somber rationalizations about the state of our union.
Perhaps this faith, in itself, is the promised land.
