Afterword Summary and Analysis

The Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Sr. comments in 1999 on Martin Luther King and the Birmingham situation. He lists examples of successful African-Americans in Manhattan and California and a young African-American boy and girl in Chicago and small southern town both dreaming and studying about the possibilities for their future. These figures contrast with MLK's introduction of the young and impoverished boy and girl with no ability to dream a realistic future. Jackson reflects on differences between MLK's 1963 and thirty-six years later in his experience of 1999. He is reminded how far the nation has come since then. There is no freedom and equality as promised in the Declaration of Independence for anyone not white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant and a male landowner. One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963, the time arrives to launch the campaign to test civil rights in Birmingham.

The...