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Epilogue
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Epilogue THE DEAD WILL NOT return, and our martyrs will stay at peace. We survivors have got a second wind, and the young will draw their first. Martin left us with a dream unrealized and a promise unfulfilled. Our nation deceives itself with the fiction that the task is complete and racism is dead and all is well. The myth surrounds us that America suddenly has become color-blind, and that all that remains is an economic problem. No greater lie has ever been told, and the tellers of it, if they have eyes to see and minds to think, must know it. The tired among us must recharge our batteries. The uninitiated must learn to gird their loins. We have not finished the job of making our country whole. Jesse Jackson has given us the great promise of a restructuring of the political institutions. That promise must be fulfilled. The "rainbow coalition " has not come together. and it will not be driven into formation by expansive rhetoric. It will require careful and patient nurturing and sophisticated knowledge of how coalitions work. Also, the late eighties and the nineties must see a rebuilding of America's black folk-a renaissance. Centuries of prejudice and poverty have wreaked havoc with folk of color. A new people in a renewed nation must face the new century. But that is another story, whose telling must await another time-and another book. This time not for jailgoing and bleeding heads, but for long-range planning and sophisticated strategizing. There will be less demonstration and more cerebration. The narrative of this odyssey has ended. ...