If Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today he would just have turned 81. Perhaps he would have been as lucid and funny and deep and powerful as his friend, Joseph Lowery, was in delivering the benediction after President Obama was sworn in Tuesday.
King would have been bursting with pride, of course, that four decades after he laid his life on the line to free blacks from second-class citizenship, the citizens of the United States had elected a black man to lead the nation.
But I suspect King would have been just as pleased at what took place at D.C.’s John Philip Sousa Middle School on Monday, the day we celebrated his birthday.
I had gone to the middle school in Anacostia to volunteer with groups installing solar panels on the school’s roof and delivering energy-saving kits to folks in the neighborhood. But I was captivated by the events taking place in the school’s auditorium.
There I saw King’s dream of kids of various colors and races and classes coming together to perform. The content of their character far outshone the color of their skin.
The musicians were members of the Alice Deal Jazz Combo. Alice Deal lies at the center of what I call Upper Caucasia, between Wisconsin and Connecticut avenues in Ward 3. The leader, Roger Jackson, is African-American, but the musicians were white, with the exception of Weiyang Xiong, who played the clarinet. Eli Ferster played the bass; Darcy Shevlin blew the slide trombone; Jamie Finucane was on the drums; Will Church played the sax, Vincent Femia played guitar and Nathaniel Remez was on the trumpet.
They came to Sousa, at the heart of a rough neighborhood near Fort Dupont, sponsored by the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival.
They played Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing” while Sousa Middle School student Beancka Boothe read King’s speech “A Letter From the Birmingham Jail.” They played “Autumn Leaves” while Sousa’s Mercedes Grier read King’s Lincoln Memorial Address.
For me, the high point of the concert came when the Deal combo played “Wade in the Water” to accompany Sousa’s dance ensemble.
RaNesha Lee, Nathesha Lewis, Qoundrice Watkins and Nautica Gant twirled across the stage in white dresses that fanned out in rhythmic time to the music. Martha Graham would have approved.
Sunny Sumter, executive director of the Ellington Jazz Festival, beamed after the dance. “It’s Ward 3 and Ward 7 coming together,” she told me. “I could not be more proud. These kids are so energetic. And their hearts are wide open.”
With hearts wide open, with a new president whose mother was white and father was black, with a mayor who has assembled a multiracial government and never plays the race card, it’s just possible that the city that is the nation’s capital could become that beacon of integration that we thought we were in 1978, when Marion Barry first became mayor.
Perhaps Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream can happen here.
