I don’t mind saying to Chicago or to anybody, I’m tired of marching. Tired of marching for something that should have been mine at birth. I don’t mind saying to you tonight… I don’t mind saying to you tonight that I’m tired of the tensions surrounding our days. I don’t mind saying to you tonight that I’m tired of living every day under the threat of death. I have no martyr complex. I want to live as long as anybody in this building tonight and sometimes I begin to doubt whether I’m going to make it through. I must confess I’m tired. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.

It’s both interesting and funny how we never hear this Martin Luther King speech during MLK Day. I remember watching King giving this speech during his final years in full color on the 1980s PBS series, “Eye on the Prize.”

The Dream is Dead it’s no longer deferred or even deterred it’s Dead! In the case of Martin Luther King’s Dream, his assassination was an attempt to deter the Dream. The Dream officially became deferred once the Civil Rights Movement became exploited by poverty/race pimps (Jess Jackson, Al Sharpton, Andrew Young, John Lewis, Joseph Lowery, etc). Under their leadership,’ The Dream had festered like a sore’ and stunk like rotten meat,’ eventually sagging like a heavy load’ until the Dream died (exploded) when Coretta Scott King, MLK’s widow, died.

The Dream is Dead.

What more can be said? Every MLK day, we pray, we sway, we moan, we groan, we sing, we chant, we march, and we listen to poverty/race hustlers talked about how we have a long-Long-LONG way to go to equality all to the background of MLK’s “I have a Dream” speech. Then, we play Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday” or Common’s “A Dream,” for the more hip-hop conscious, before or after going to an MLK event.

And at the end of the day, nothing is accomplished well maybe the lining of the monetary pockets of the black church, post-MLK Civil Rights leaders’ and an ego pat’ on the head for giving time, attention, and money for a worthless, disempowering feel-good’ event. I haven’t shared this, but I have become acquainted with members of the King family (and no it’s not the King children). They told me they believe the Dream died when King was assassinated. I had a hard time believing that, because a world in which we are “not judged by the color of our skins but by the content of our characters” is something I hold dear. However, from looking at the current state of the Civil Rights movement, which I call the Post-MLK Civil Right Movement,’ I believe it has nothing to do with achieving The Dream. If The Dream manifests, then the movement is over…which means to the poverty/race hustlers no more limelight, no more cash, and no more attention. They would be out of work and they don’t want that to happen!

That’s why there’s nothing of brotherly love’ and definitely nothing about love of country’ in the Post-MLK Civil Rights movement. It’s about using fear; it’s about promoting ignorance and despair to fuel the selfish and self-promoting agenda of a select few an agenda far removed from Martin Luther King’s Dream. For example, let’s take a look at one of worst offenders of The Dream, Jesse Jackson.

First of all, Jackson was NOT on the balcony when King was assassinated. Kenneth Timmerman’s book Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson gives the details on how Jesse Jackson funded himself and his family via his organizations and corporate shakedowns that were supposed fight forThe Dream.

Recently in Atlanta, Georgia, the quote-unquote birthplace of Civil Rights, in the race for Fulton County Chair, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and Civil Rights Veterans John Lewis and Andrew Young did a notorious race-baiting commercial for black democratic candidate John Eaves. Using rhetoric and fear tactics, they claimed that the republicans were going to roll back the clock on Civil Rights if elected into office (let alone that that hasn’t happened during the tenures of the three previous republican Fulton County Chairpersonsbut hey, we gotta keep the Negroes in check, so we can keep the checks comingright?)

This is not The Dream. The Dream was meant for everyone not a few profiteers. The Dream had nothing to do with scarring people with the return of Jim Crow. The Dream was for a better nation, and perhaps a better world, but now, after 20+ years, it has become a stagnated, sickening joke. That’s sad, but what’s sadder is how black Americans continue to fall for these poverty/race hustlers and their fear-based hollow tactics. John Eaves won the Fulton County chair seat by a wide margin.

So, for MLK Day, I will not run to the nearest black church. I will not listen to King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech, because it’s already played to death to the point of disgust for me, as if the man said nothing else. I will not sing the appropriate Negro spiritual for MLK Day. I will not listen to another sermon about how we as a race still have a long-Long-LONG way to go towards equality’. I will not play Stevie Wonder or Common MLK songs or other MLK related songs; and I definitely will NOT march! Remember, during his final years, King undeniably stated that he was tired of marching.

As the post-MLK Civil Rights leaders’ continue to capitalize and suck the movement’ dry, I will mourn the death of The Dream. And then from there, I’ll live my dreams and not look for a movement, or a march, or a leader to do it for me.