Courtesy of Library of Congress
Seeking signs of hope for a post-pandemic world
“Where do we go from here?”
The question raised in the title of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s book is as apropos today as it was when it was released a year before his assassination in 1967. Perhaps more so.
Although the coronavirus is still with us, vaccines to combat it provide a hopeful glimmer of a post-COVID world. Yet, in its wake, African Americans will be left with the disproportionate health, economic, social and deadly ruins exacerbated by the global pandemic.
In 1965, when African Americans were battling the multiple epidemics of poverty, mass unemployment and segregation, King advocated a $50 billion federal plan, similar to the GI Bill, aimed at helping poor people rebuild and invest in their own communities. In a Playboy magazine Interview by writer Alex Haley, King argued such a plan would encourage Black people to stay and build in their own neighborhoods.
Flash forward 55 years later, and Black people are not only besieged by what King described as the “triple evils of poverty, racism and militarism,” but added to that calamitous concoction is the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black lives along with the ongoing threat of police brutality.
As hundreds of thousands of people across the nation gather to honor King’s memory is it also time to revisit his other dream of rebuilding Black America?
“Most definitely,” said Jessie Davis, owner of St. Louis-based JK’s Trucking, a freight company, and Davis Recycling, a scrap yard and recycling business. A couple years ago, Davis floated a proposal among a few aldermen and the mayor to create a program for young people and newly released prisoners. The idea was to use city funds to train employees for jobs, clean up their own neighborhoods and, in the process, learn recycling and trucking.
Although he received no useful follow-up from politicians, Davis said he still believes the idea not only has merit but it’s past time for implementation. A program like the one King proposed aimed at funding do-for-self efforts in metropolitan areas would be helpful, especially after the pandemic subsides.
“Local and federal funding would provide an opportunity to do grassroots projects like the one I offered. I’m not some guy from Chesterfield or west county,” Davis stressed. “I’m from this community and I’m trying to help.”
Miki Jones is president of AMJ Investment Group. Her company, in partnership with the city, Kwame Building Group and 21stt Ward Ald. John Collins-Muhammad, recently announced an $81 million plan, “The City District,” aimed at revitalizing 10 blocks in the O’Fallon Park Neighborhood in north St. Louis.
When asked about King’s 1965 plan, Jones answered with a quote from King:
“’Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes…’”
A federal plan like King’s, she said, could bring much-needed opportunities to Black neighborhoods like O’Fallon Park.