Looking Backward from the Tricentennial

Chapter Two

Once again, Julian found himself unable to estimate the number of people around him with any great precision. Looking backward, he saw more than a thousand black faces peering up at the podium, filling the area with a comfortable density and not an oppressive one. The atmosphere felt like history in the making, the multitudes standing together with a shared intention, waiting to hear Reverend Shaver's call to action. Along the perimeter, vans from local television stations balanced cameras above them, recording the crowd as the program began.

After an opening prayer, a social media influencer stepped up to the podium and delivered an impassioned speech in the style that had earned him millions of followers. They were fighting against an unjust system that had existed since before they were born, he told them, a system that inertia would carry onward into eternity unless they worked together to shift its direction. The crowd roared approval.

An economist offered a vision of the financial power that would be unleashed by putting billions of dollars into black communities. "As Dr. King said," he reminded the audience, "'The poor, transformed into purchasers, will do a good deal on their own.'"

Next, a mayor from the Midwest spoke of the success of a pilot program in her city. She urged the crowd to pressure their local representatives for equitable economic policies and social programs to reduce poverty.

Excitement built as a member of Congress gave a rousing speech, first urging them to ask their own representatives to support HR 40, a bill to study reparations, and then challenging them to turn out and vote that fall. "Turn out and vote," Julian echoed disdainfully. "Like that'll make a difference."

"It could," Edith insisted. "We have power, Julian."

"Doesn't matter, not with the choices they give us." He gripped the cardboard tube, comforted by the unyielding center. "It's pay to play. We wouldn't all be here today if we were in the game."

Her eyes twinkled. "I'm all for changing the game."

The audience erupted with cheers as the Reverend Alvin Shaver was introduced. Bounding up the stairs with surprising agility for a man sculpted from generations of Southern cooking, the preacher boomed out a greeting through his headset microphone. In his late forties, his hair was still jet black, but his short beard was undergoing follicle gentrification. Around them, people pulled out their phones to snap pictures for social media. Edith held her own up, recording video of Shaver.

The reverend stood basking in the morning light, arms spread in a vaguely crucifixion-like pose as he began. "Dear Lord," he intoned, "we thank you for the bounty of your sunshine this morning. We're grateful for its warmth, which you have created in your wisdom, that every one of your children can benefit from. It is freely available to all of your creatures, it feeds the cycle of life, it brings order to our day.

"The sun, however, is a master of illusion." His hand pointed upward with an accusing finger. "We may think we see it, rising above the nation's capital, but we are really looking backward in time at the light let loose eight and a half minutes ago. Now, it's always good to look forward, but sometimes we benefit from looking backward as well, to examine how we arrived where we are.

"This year, we will observe the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of America's founding. Millions will celebrate—I will commemorate, I will remember, I will cast a critical eye backward over those two and a half centuries. Whatever you might call it—the semiquincentennial, the quarter millennial, or the sestercentennial—I call it a failure to live up to the plain words of that Declaration: all people have unalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

"Like many of you," Shaver said, his arms open to embrace the crowd, "I am a descendant of enslaved people. We stand here in the shadow of the Washington Monument, in the shadow of a man whose legacy is both figuratively and literally built on the backs of our ancestors. If we were to climb up and look out upon the district, we'd see a city where the average household income exceeds one hundred thousand dollars yet one in four children lives in poverty. We'd see a city where white households have eighty-one times the wealth of black households. We'd see a city which for centuries has directed a deliberate and determined diminishment of rights for people of color."