The National Guard had occupied Delaware’s largest city for nine months in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, and the trauma from both of these events left the Black community reeling, marking a moment in Wilmington’s history that city residents still recall today.
Thus, we self-consciously called our Movement, the Black Freedom Movementand demanded “FreedomNow,” not civil rights now. We composed and sang freedomsongs, not civil rights songs. And we built freedomschools, not civil rights schools, and we risked our lives on freedomrides, not civil rights rides. You can always say there was indeed a fight for civil rights. But although civil rights were an important concern of the Black Freedom Movement, the Black Freedom struggle was committed to freedom as a more expansive concept, practice and goal. In a word, it was concerned about freedom from oppression and freedom to grow, develop and come into the fullness of ourselves.
It was three years ago that a group of national business leaders launched a movement called Black Wealth 2020 partially based on the economic vision articulated by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King said in his final speech on April 3, 1968: “It’s all right to talk about streets flowing with milk and honey, but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here and his children who can’t eat three square meals a day. It’s all right to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God’s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee.”