God, family help everyone capture King’s ‘dream’

    Calvin Moret, 88, doesn’t remember Aug. 28, 1963, with clarity, but on the day Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Moret doesn’t think he was glued to his radio or TV.
    “It was delivered at the middle of the day, so in all likelihood I would have been working at the family business,” said Moret, who apprenticed with his father, Adolph Moret, and then took over their 7th Ward print shop, Moret Press. “That’s the one thing about self-employed people. If you don’t work, you don’t have any income.”
    As a former Tuskegee Airman who was busy rearing a family, Moret read all about King’s speech the next day in the newspapers. The printed word, you see, was in Moret’s blood.
    Moret came up at a time when segregation was printed on signs – “Colored” and “White” – and imprinted on hearts. The printed signs simply reinforced a Jim Crow reality.
    For a young Creole businessman, the solution to Jim Crow was both to work around the signs and work within the family to keep them focused on God and education.
    “The advantage I had was that my grandmother lived in the house with us,” Moret said. “She told me so many things coming up. It was like taking an extracurricular course. One of the admonitions she always had for me was about listening to people who made sense, not to foolish people. Even the Bible says that.”
    Moret’s service in WWII as a Tuskegee Airman belied the 1925 comments from an Army general who claimed blacks did not have the “cranial capacity” to fly or navigate airplanes.
    “It’s amazing how smart we got 20 years later,” Moret said, laughing. “I’m sure that guy had to crawl under a rock somewhere.”
    At the time King spoke to Americans, blacks were impeded from voting by all kinds of arcane rules, and in the South, they could not sleep or eat in most establishments that catered to whites. The civil rights revolution that swept through the country 50 years ago finally changed laws to, at least on paper, guarantee equality in areas of public accommodation.
    Through the lens of five decades, Moret has seen the change.
    “I have seen a lot of progress, but I have not seen that we have reached the goal,” he said. “There’s still a lot to be done, probably from both sides. We both have a common goal, and if we were not working against one another, we would accomplish so much.”
    As a cradle Catholic, Moret sees the solution to so much of what harms the culture today residing in the family and the church. The soaring out-of-wedlock birth rate in both the African-American and white communities places children immediately at risk, and that leads to poor supervision, failing education and crime.
    “First of all, we have to acknowledge that our solutions are not working,” Moret said. “We have kicked God out of our society, and yet we have acquiesced to the people who are proponents of taking God out.”
    Moret uses a simple example of the street sign that states, “No Left Turn.” Those signs, he says, are put in place to decrease the probability of collisions and keep people safe. In the same way, the commandment against murder relates to the proper ordering of a decent society.
    “The solution is not building more jails and hiring more police and attorneys,” Moret said. “It’s teaching right and wrong, and you can’t do that at the high school level. It has to be taught from early on. We have to understand we cannot do it on our own. We have to understand that God is a part of our lives – a major part. All the laws we have are not contrary to God’s teaching.”
    The right to vote, bought at the price of blood in the streets, should be a cherished achievement. Instead, Moret said, many people sit home on election day or don’t even bother to register.
Sacrifice is redemptive
    It’s something that didn’t sit well with his father, who lived until the age of 102. Moret’s father grew up during the Great Depression and kept his business alive by working hard, following the rules and denying himself.
    These days, Moret says, sacrifice is thought of as empty and non-redemptive.
    “I often think about my dad because I lived alongside him for such a long time, and he passed on his philosophies to me,” Moret said. “I asked him how he managed during the Depression when so many people lost their homes. He told me what got him through the Depression was deprivation. He would deprive himself of things he wanted so that he could get the things he needed. But that’s something that has to be done individually. It can’t be mandated. People today think doing that will expose themselves to some kind of contagious disease.”
    When Moret does speaking engagements at prisons in the area, he tries to offer his collective family wisdom, earned by doing the right thing, day after day.
    “I always tell them to try to attach themselves to some old people,” Moret said. “I know some old women who are 90 and 95 years old. They don’t have degrees behind their names, but having lived that long, they have special things you don’t get out of books.”
    So, what about the dream, now 50 years old?
    “The family makes a world of difference,” Moret said.
    Moret’s father was married for 67 years. Moret and his wife Bernice have been married for 59.
    They are still living and passing on the dream.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].