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Thursday, September 23, 2004

Click Here for "I Have a Nightmare"

"'I have a nightmare,' she writes, 'that the black family in America has disappeared. While 80 percent of black children lived in a family with a father and a mother under the same roof when I [King] grew up, fewer than 30 percent do today. Why have we allowed this to happen? Neither the Klan nor Jim Crow did this to us. We have done it to ourselves.' In these few sentences, she identifies the single greatest problem facing black Americans today; and in so doing, she articulates what our most prominent civil rights leaders who focus almost exclusively on white society's allegedly racist transgressions dare not say. 'I have a nightmare,' she continues, 'that young black women, and even young black girls, are entering motherhood at a higher rate than during my [King's] lifetime without first entering into holy matrimony with the man who fathered that child. I have a nightmare that black men are conceiving babies and are not doing the right thing to make sure that their children are brought up right.'"



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