Free Dreamer by Charles Johnson

uncovered ever heal? At times I felt uncomfortable with the SCLC’s and NAACP’s reliance, their dependency and complete faith in Washington’s clout, the protection it offered black people—but at what price? Nothing, my mother once told me, came without a price; therewas always a trade-off of some kind, even though one might not see it clearly in the beginning. Mightn’t whites come to perceive Negroes as no longer a victimized class but a privileged one, thus leading to a resentment and a lack of respect and racial disdain greater than anything witnessed during the era of Jim Crow? Mightn’t too much reliance on the federal government, even in private affairs such as rearing a family, lead to the inability to do for oneself, unhampered by bad laws, that was the Movement’s original purpose?
    I switched channels and found an all-music station playing the Supremes, then looked back at Amy. She slept with one finger brushing her lips, and as I looked at her I felt lost. Brown freckles ran right across her nose, and since she lay facing the east, sunlight brought out highlights in her hair. She seemed to grow quieter and sleep more deeply with each county we put between ourselves and the dislocating spirit of the city. Back there, her apartment had five locks on the door. On top of that, she lived in a section of town so crimeridden that she was obliged to padlock every door inside too. It was a frightful way to live, in fear, barricaded behind your door each evening, wondering if a neighbor might kill you in your sleep, and it was that dreadful situation the minister hoped to change.
    I knew his odds were bad.
    The nonviolent Movement drew successfully from the ranks of the black middle class, students at Fisk, and liberal whites in its early days, but stalled and sputtered in poor, grassroots communities. King himself subjected it to this criticism, saying voting rights and integrated lunch counters cost the nation nothing. The new campaign—class struggle—would indeed be costly. Yet over and over he insisted that the Movement needed to wage war on two fronts. First, changing the souls of men so that they not only protested for peace but in themselves
were
peace embodied, loving ineven life’s smallest affairs. And, second, he called for changing society so the soul might have a field in which to flourish. Neither front, he said, could be ignored, for one reinforced the other. Tremendous effort had gone into the second theater of battle, I thought. Far less into the first. So little, in fact, that as I steered south through the land of Lincoln, down a steaming highway dotted with roadkill between Springfield and Centralia, as Amy and Smith slept, my thoughts reached back to a speech the earlier “reformist” King delivered in Chicago, one that challenged and chided me when I was a freshman at Columbia College in 1964. That speech had looked inward, not out. It emphasized being fully alive in the present, which I found appealing, because didn’t dwelling on the Promised Land or heaven or the Workers’ Paradise postpone full immersion in life to the distant future, so that since the Civil War black people could never be at peace in the present, comfortable with the past, and were waiting, always waiting, for a day of redemption that forever receded like the horizon? Two years earlier King had not spoken that way. He’d said, “When you are behind in a foot race, the only way to get ahead is to run faster than the man in front of you. So when your white roommate says he’s tired and goes to sleep, you stay up and burn the midnight oil.” He spoke from experience, having maintained only a 2.48 grade point average at Morehouse College; by the time he left Crozer Seminary he was student body president and class valedictorian. He talked of his father—who, like old Joe Kennedy, was not an easy father to have—a poor, barely literate boy whose