How Many Years?

Photo of Jackie Robinson from Wikimedia Commons

Please linger a moment with this line, especially the ‘allowed to be free,’ written for the song Blowin’ in the Wind, by Bob Dylan in 1962.

How many years can some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?

Ironic, isn’t it? That’s poet Dylan’s point.

Allow means to give permission. By whom? Who gives permission to be free? More to the point, who needs permission to be free?

This language suggests the source of the problem and reminds me of something James Baldwin said in the film I am Not Your Negro.

“I remember, for example, when the ex-Attorney General, Mr. Robert Kennedy, said that it was conceivable that in forty years in America we might have a Negro president. And that sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. They did not hear (and possibly will never hear) the laughter and the bitterness and the scorn with which this statement was greeted.

From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barbershop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he’s already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for four hundred years and now he tells us that maybe in forty years, if you’re good, we may let you become president.”

I’m a white man born in America in 1949. I’ve never thought my rights — to speak, to vote, to own property, to walk down the street without fear — have been given to me by anyone.

Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, tells me my rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, are self evident and endowed by a Creator, for ALL MEN, meaning everyone. (source)

No person ought need permission.

But, of course, in America, the land of the free, they have. The list is long, and includes a litany of out-groups.

Two years before I was born, Jackie Robinson broke American baseball’s color barrier. In other words, he was allowed by those who controlled the game to join the Brooklyn Dodgers.

In the first sentence in the above paragraph, he acts, but only after he was acted upon.

That, in a nutshell, gives the lie to the myth of America as ‘the land of the free.’