My apologies to regular readers.

Tomorrow is King Day. As an Atlantan, it's a day I take seriously. This essay takes a serious look at the issues arising from Dr. King's life, and the work still unfinished. More tech bloggie goodness will come later.

I was shocked while watching Meet the Press today.

It was the set-up to an obligatory debate between two black people on the legacy of Dr. King. Marian Wright Edelman was to say that politics were the problem. Dr. John McWhorter was to say the culture and immorality were the problem.

But before they got off their talking points there was Dr. King himself, in a 1967 kinescope, on the same program, with host Lawrence Spivak.

I watched in amazement as Spivak said (and I'm quoting this from memory) “As someone who came up from poverty yourself, why can’t more do what you’ve done?” King responded with his poor people’s agenda, but it was the question that was shocking, not the answer.

Because Dr. King didn’t come up from poverty.

I live a few miles from Dr. King’s birth home. My early neighbors on Winter Avenue knew him, some worked with him.

Dr. King was middle class. Both his parents were there for him. They had a nice, comfortable home. (That's it, to the right.) His father was respected, a leader in the community. This was in the 1930s, when tens of millions, white as well as black, were wretchedly poor. He was a teen during the War, just out of high school when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Brooklyn. And it was the contradiction between his life on Auburn Avenue and the racism he found off it, the denial of opportunity even to black veterans who’d risked their lives, that fired the movement he came to lead.

I suddenly realized there have only been three eras in the history of blacks in America. The first was the Age of Slavery, which ended in 1865. The second was the Age of Jim Crow, in which Dr. King grew up. The third is the Age of Segregation, where we now live.

The Open Housing Act had a profound impact on Winter Avenue, my home. Nearly all the whites fled for the suburbs. They were replaced by middle class blacks. These were fine people. Some were great people. I know this for a fact. They worked hard and brought their kids up right. Most did well.

But my neighbors (I moved here in 1983) had gotten out, and what they left was a segregation more bitter than any America has ever known. It wasn’t just racial segregation. It was economic segregation, social segregation, cultural segregation. There was no one on whom those who were left could model proper behavior. The models had moved to my block, and to other blocks like it. Most of those left had just one parent at home, and either she worked until she broke or she gave up, lost her will, took the check, and complained.

It’s been a little more than a generation since that 1967 kinescope, for me. My son is just a little older than I am now. But for many ghetto-dwellers it’s been 3 generations. Babies had babies, had babies, have babies.

Whose kids are these? We have people in this country who will march and die and even kill to protect the unborn, so they can force young ghetto women at the point of a gun to be enslaved to the first sperm that gets into them, no matter how it gets there. But once these kids are born whose are they? They are completely isolated. There’s no one on whom they can model good choices. So, no surprise, their culture is a ghetto culture, a culture of resentment, of anger and violence, and that culture infects even middle class black kids, even upper class white kids.

How do you break that culture which has now had three generations to build? You can only change people one at a time. Atlanta made a choice a decade ago, starting in my neighborhood.

They broke up the big public housing project at East Lake. They replaced it with a mixed-income development. Some of the homes were sold, at market rates. Others were rented, under Section 8, but under strict controls. A school was built for the neighborhood, which emphasized self-discipline, moral choices, and racial pride.

It’s worked. Kids who came to the Drew Charter School when it opened and graduated last spring read and add on grade level. Many were admitted to high-quality high school programs, both public and private, and they’re doing well. The program even helped my own son, who is not black, to gain some of the self-discipline he needed to succeed.

But it’s not enough. A few were helped. But thousands were left behind. They weren’t let back into the new East Lake. The ghetto, and all its isolation, simply moved on.

Let’s do some math. If 9 in 10 fail without intervention, and reproduce starting at 15, what good does it do society how the 1 in 10 do? My son’s classmates have an excellent chance of fulfilling their potential, of graduating college, of making something of themselves. They will move into middle-class suburbs, they will probably delay marriage, they will likely have far fewer kids than those who weren’t helped.

But the tide of the ghetto will keep rising. The number of hip-hoppers will keep rising. It will continue to rise until we take responsibility for all our sons and daughters, which was the point Dr. King was trying to make, back on that old kinescope.

It’s a point Spivak ignored. It’s a point that’s ignored today. You keep ignoring that point and in time you will be overwhelmed by it.

Numbers don’t lie.