Street Corner Blues

Cast members from “Street Corner Blues.”

On June 6, 1915 a man to be named James was brought into this world.

By William Hoke

Through his life he saw discrimination, racism, segregation, and because of these things he watched as a man went out into the same world and took a stand against those very things, to change and make right the injustice that was allowed in our society. He saw a man who would become the voice of an enslaved people, a people that fought just to be called human, to have more than their parents ever dreamed of having.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took a stand on the foundation that every
man was created equal, that we all deserved the rights of all free men,
a belief that James himself lived by.  James in his lifetime would have
a family. Then came a dark day for the world, the death of Martin
Luther King Jr. But you see even in death the message that Dr. King
spoke of, was still alive in those like James and people that knew of
Dr. King’s ultimate sacrifice.

You see even though James’s would never truly know Dr. King he
would know what he stood for because now we could vote, he now could go
to any restaurant we choose, he now could drink from a water fountain
that once was forbidden, but even more James’s children had a choice to
be whatever they wanted to be, all because a man stood up and died for
him and his family.

Now, forty years after the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., are
we truly still understanding or living by his message to become
whatever we want, and to have the right to do so. Was his voice only
for those who lived in that era? For James that question will never be
answered, eighteen years after his passing. But his children still
live: does what James intilled in them live on, even forty years later?
Has the movement really paid off?

These are questions that are raised and answered in the
production of “Street Corner Blues.” It was not to be that things would
change completely in James’s lifetime, but will they in the lifetimes
of his children? In yours? Dr. King marched so that we might have equal
rights, and that did come in James’s lifetime. Now, what shall come in
his children’s lifetime?
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