I Have A Dream...

August 28, 1963. This ten-year-old could be seen roller-skating up and down the straight street of St Georges Square in the SW1 district of Pimlico. This Victorian layout barely deserved to be called a Square. Rather, it was an elongated strip of green, back then, boasting a disused set of tennis courts at one end which was towered over by the spire of St Saviour's Anglican Church, built to separate the garden from the main road of Lupus Street at a busy area where this street also intersects with Belgrave Road. Hence the church also served unintentionally as a sound barrier from the busy traffic, making St Georges Square a quiet place to live and to stroll around.

Gardens, St Georges Square, Pimlico.

It would be relatively easy to imagine St Georges Square in its pre-War heyday, especially around the 19th Century. Townhouse owners would leave their servants to tend to their duties while they stroll arm-in-arm with their wives around the central garden. The perfect gentleman, attired in the peak of traditional but rather tightly-fitting English tailoring whilst she would find her corset rather restricting and somewhat uncomfortable, yet does not complain as the two make a comment to each other over the well-manicured flower bed.

Meanwhile, gentlemen dressed in white whack the ball over the net in an energy-sapping tennis rally until the ball hits the net, the rally ends and a point is scored. Like cricket, tennis was perceived as an English gentleman's game, which unlike football, carries an air of snobbery, although they may not admit this to themselves.

All these - garden, disused tennis courts, church - were all nicely slotted in between two parallel streets, each bearing the same name. But the postman would never be confused. One street of terraced townhouses were all with odd numbers. It was the street on the other side of the garden strip which carried all the even numbers. We live in the odd-number street.

But I'll go back a few years before 1963. Probably around 1956 or 1957. Left free to play outside our basement gate. After a while, quite likely after a prolonged silence, Mum decided to see if I was okay. Upstairs from the basement, the street was deserted of any pedestrian or traffic alike. Mum begins to panic, quite likely calling out my name from the top of her voice yet still out of earshot. Eventually, she sees someone approaching. She then asked him if he had seen her son anywhere. The man replied that he did see a three or a four-year-old boy across the other side of the busy Grosvenor Road, past the far end of the square, holding onto some railings and looking down into the River Thames.

Mum ran more than 300 metres down the street and crossed the main road to see me standing there, innocent and totally unaware of any potential danger, enjoying the view of the river, perhaps impressed with the more numerous boats which plied along. Not too long after that incident, when Mum used to send me on shopping errands, we all became aware that travelling as a sole backpacker was a trait I inherited whilst still in her womb.

Indeed, it was a different world in those days! A world when ownership of a car was more of a privilege than a necessity, along with "helicopter parenting" and political correctness were both totally unknown and unnecessary. It was when children were children who could go out to play safely unsupervised, whether roller-skating up and down the street, kicking a football in the central public garden, or if out in the sticks, to play in the woods with schoolmates, perhaps damming a stream or building a secret tree-house. Those days when a grazed knee was quite common, rough-and-tumble was part of growing up, and words such as paedophilia would never appear in any Oxford or Collins dictionaries.

And yet, even during such wonderful and innocent childhood days, under the surface was a feeling of deep discontent. The ship Empire Windrush had brought the first generation of Jamaicans across the Atlantic into Tilbury as early as 1948 under Government recommendations to rebuild post-War Britain. Indeed, it wasn't long before angry young Englishmen began to put up posters ordering Coons Go Home, and other insulting posters. Even as late as 1978, National Front posters were still on display in the streets.

Like the one poster, I saw pinned to a tree every morning after alighting at Weybridge Station in the heart of leafy Surry. And it remained there for months. As I walked along Brooklands Road to the site of a disused car racing track on which the giant British Aircraft Corporation works occupied before closing down during the 1980s, I was confronted with the words:

Support National Front for a WHITE England. 

What more can I say? Seeing this poster in the home country of both Darwinian evolution and Francis Galton's eugenics may send shock waves among our present generation, especially among Black Lives Matter street protestors, there's little doubt that such language was inspired by Enoch Powell's 1968 Rivers of Blood speech he delivered in Birmingham, insisting all coloured immigrants should return to their original home country before any interracial conflict arises.

"Shall we take a stroll, my dear?"

It was worse in America. The black slave as seen as a mere chattel to be used by his owner's discretion and regarded as an animal going back long before Darwin thought up his evolutionary theories.* And so many a British churchgoer would praise the likes of devoted Christian, William Wilberforce to usher in his stance of having slavery abolished, and so, in Washington DC, one black man, Martin Luther King, on August 28, 1963, made his famed speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in front of an audience of 250,000 civil rights supporters which opened with his famous words, I have a dream...

Like William Wilberforce, Martin Luther King was also a devoted Christian. He was one of the founders and the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which encouraged black churches to campaign nonviolently for freedom against pro-slavery bias as insisted by the Ku-Klax-Klan and any other pro-slavery organisations and supporters. And that was a hundred years after slavery was officially abolished, yet the driving force among white American supremacists to revive slavery is very much alive and kicking.

Included in his famed speech was his stance in condemning capitalism as being associated with slavery, as well as his defence for the poor and his opposition towards the Vietnam war. After all, according to him, the average plantation owner used unpaid forced labour to grow and harvest his crops, to put on sale to the market with every intention of making a profit. It's for this particular reason for Luther King to be assassinated whilst still in his prime age of 39 years. That is the belief held by the FBI that Luther was part of a conspiracy towards Communist support. Under orders of FBI director J. Edger Hoover, he died of a gunshot wound on April 4th, 1968, just sixteen days before Enoch Powell gave his Rivers of Blood speech on April 20th, 1968. 

This I find so astonishing! Surely, for America to protect her own interests and also to serve as a warning against any more Communist conspiracies both within and elsewhere, particularly for the USSR, worldwide broadcast of the assassination would have surely reached Enoch Powell's ears in good time before even writing his speech. Yet he didn't call it off in respect of Luther King's demise. Instead, his fiery speech against black immigrants runs almost parallel to the views of the KKK who, incidentally, burn crucifixes, as if in complete denial of the Christian faith, although many of them may claim to be Christian.

What the underlying belief I find really creepy that there is some correlation between the views of Enoch Powell, along with the KKK, the National Front, the English Defence League, and other far-right political parties, and that of the Nazis. In one way or another, all these groups insist that the white man is superior to all other races. While the English far-right believes that all blacks and Muslims should be kicked out of the UK (even if they are born here of immigrant parents or grandparents) - the KKK believe that all blacks should be enslaved and owned as personal property, while the Nazi says that all who don't fit the ideal white Aryan race should be wiped off this planet.

All, except the Nazis, claim to be Christian or have Christian connotations, that is, they hide behind a respectable Christian front while they deny the very essence of the faith - that we are all made in the image of God, regardless of race, that through the trespass of Adam and Eve, we are born with a sinful nature and therefore face Judgement, unless redeemed through faith in the risen Jesus Christ who died to atone for all our sins.

Created in the image of God! If one look can launch a thousand ships, then this little statement can kill all racism stone dead. But instead, the natural man's fallen state allows evolution to percolate into his mind and eventually into his conscience until denying it in favour of Creationism sounds rather loopy, and end up facing ridicule by atheists, many of them are scientists and the rest of the majority are well educated. Therefore, to him, Darwinism must be true after all and therefore holds a degree of justification for believing in, defending, and even advocating racism, whichever form it takes.

Martin Luther King Jr.

And as I write this, I have wondered whether Brexit too falls into the same pit. After all, back in 2016, one of the strongest arguments for leaving the European Union was about immigration, both from non-EU countries and mainly from one EU country, which was Poland. After the referendum results, which was for Leave, won by a narrow margin, spikes of violence erupted in some cities against both Poles and Muslims, and the Union Jack and English St George flags began to make a mass appearance.

Indeed, is any of this Christian?

We want our country back! - was the cry. But we are living in it now, aren't we?

No, I guess we aren't. The country that is wanted back is typified by St Georges Square, Pimlico, in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. White, smartly-dressed gentry, their top hats over milk-white faces gazing at the wet green grass surrounding beautiful flower beds, the soil soaked and beads of recently-fallen rainwater clinging to the petals and leaves as the gentle breeze blows. As English as English gets, maids, cycling along gravel paths cutting through country fields, sporting gentlemen engaged in a game of cricket on the village lawn, the snobbish spirit of tennis players at St Georges Square and at other tennis courts elsewhere. This idyllic, non-eventful, gentle life of the indigenous English who has the God-given right to colonise other "backward" nations but woe betide anyone thinking of colonising them...

I have a Dream... Indeed, don't we all.

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*For a full discussion about American Negro slavery, click here.