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The Rest Of The Dream, Julian Maxwell Hayter

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

I was born roughly 12 years after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his momentous "I Have a Dream" speech. My generation, raised on the first wave of hip-hop music and odes to Malcolm X, was angry with King. We thought his overtures to interracial cooperation were a mid-20th-century brand of "Uncle Tom-ing," what my mother's generation called "shuffling." We found it difficult to reconcile King's dream with the rise of crack cocaine, urban blight and black incarceration.

Many of my childhood friends parlayed that anger into prison, gang life, absentee fatherhood, and what Iceberg Slim called the "poison of street …