Moravian College's Foy Hall is usually a venue for harpsichords and bassoons. Dr. Michael Eric Dyson had neither, though he did sing at times to more than 150 people. As part of Black History Month, Dyson was invited to discuss where we are in the civil rights movement.

Charles Dickens might say "it is the best of times, and it is the worst of times." The hip-hop group Future would say, "at the same damn time." Dyson acknowledged that we've made tremendous progress, but we have a long way to go.

Dyson, a sociology professor at Georgetown University, has been described as both "a Princeton Ph.D. and a child of the streets" who grew up in Detroit. He is an admitted welfare dad who didn't start college until he was 21. Since that time, he has authored 18 books and is one of the talking heads sometimes seen on cable TV or heard on NPR discussing race relations.

According to Dyson, the civil rights movement is nothing less than the complete fulfillment of the social contract articulated by Thomas Jefferson at the founding of our nation: The immortal declaration that "all men are created equal."

He reminded his audience that it is really not all that long ago that blacks were required to drink out of separate water fountains, sit at the rear of buses and were denied access to places like Disneyworld. He noted his own experience as a child, being denied service at a restaurant because he's black.

"What's a n-, momma?" he asked, never having heard that word before. "Just you don't tell your daddy," she warned him.

Those days are over, but because we live in what Gore Vidal has called the United States of Amnesia, we quickly forget these indignities, Dyson observed. But he added it is "not truly American to hold people hostage to their racial identities."

Today, Dyson said, there is some evidence that the country is actually moving backward. The Supreme Court has nullified a core provision of the Voting Rights Act, ending nearly 50 years of U.S. oversight of elections in much of the South. And Dyson insists that black people are "precriminalized" in the minds of both black and white police officers.

"Black people don't hate the police," he insisted. "They just don't want the police to mistake us for the criminal."

Though he generally supports President Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, he had some criticism for him, too.

"Obama can't act as black in public as Bill Clinton does. He can't play the sax or start rappin' on Ellen's show." He complained that, all too often, Obama acts as though his mission is "to control the Negro madness."

Dyson believes this is just as ridiculous as when Obama complained about Pennsylvania voters who "cling" to their guns and religion. In many ways, he said, Obama has continued to reinforce a view of white superiority.

Dyson suggests hip-hop as a way of understanding what it is like to be born black and disadvantaged. He calls Tupac Shakur, a black rapper gunned down in a 1996 drive-by shooting, the "Truman Capote of the hood," a genius whose lyrics graphically described life in the ghetto. They describe it so graphically that most radio stations won't play them. This newspaper would never publish the lyrics.

And so the misunderstanding continues.