Trip Into A Burning House

As I heard from the grape vine, a few minutes before Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis in 1968, he was in a very introspective mood. The last thing he said before he died was - "I pray that we are not leading our people into a burning house". Since his death, integration has not meant much for majority of the African-American population. Granted there is good representation in professional sports and the entertainment industry coupled with a few window dressings in the political arena but where it matters most, we are not doing well. Family life in the African American community is totally broken; the African American male has become irrelevant; schools are training grounds for the prison industry (drop out rate from High School is higher than the graduation rate) as a result black men are five times as likely to go prison as to college. Those of us who are gainfully employed are the last to be hired and the first to be fired; we pay higher interest on mortgage loans and credit card debts. On top of everything, many young African American males who served their time in prison, never become full citizens again. America's psychological destruction of the African males has been developed into a science.