MLK was more than a speech to black people.
A friend sent this diary (originally posted at Daily Kos) to me and I simply have to post it. I don’t know who the author is and I can’t find anybody on Twitter who does, so I’m posting it without his approval. I can’t help it. It’s THAT GOOD. Hopefully Hamden Rice will notice that I’ve shamelessly reposted his words so I can thank him for writing them.
I dare anyone to read this and then continue to exploit Dr. King’s legacy in an effort to prove to black voters why Obama is such a disappointment to them. Go on. I dare you. If you want to argue points of fact or issues, then do it without dredging up the legacy of a man who lived and died so that black people in America could stand up and speak for themselves; so that black people could be free.
You who seek to twist and exploit Dr. King’s legacy should be embarrassed and ashamed of yourselves. Please stop it. You too, Cornel West.
Just stop it.
All emphases are the author’s:
This will be a very short diary. It will not contain any links or any scholarly references. It is about a very narrow topic, from a very personal, subjective perspective.
The topic at hand is what Martin Luther King actually did, what it was that he actually accomplished.
The reason I’m posting this is because there were dueling diaries over the weekend about Dr. King’s legacy, and there is a diary up now (not on the rec list but on the recent list) entitled, “Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Dream Not Yet Realized.” I’m sure the diarist means well as did the others. But what most people who reference Dr. King seem not to know is how Dr. King actually changed the subjective experience of life in the United States for African Americans. And yeah, I said for African Americans, not for Americans, because his main impact was his effect on the lives of African Americans, not on Americans in general. His main impact was not to make white people nicer or fairer. That’s why some of us who are African Americans get a bit possessive about his legacy. Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy, despite what our civil religion tells us, is not color blind.
I remember that many years ago, when I was a smart ass home from first year of college, I was standing in the kitchen arguing with my father. My head was full of newly discovered political ideologies and black nationalism, and I had just read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, probably for the second time.
A bit of context. My father was from a background, which if we were talking about Europe or Latin America, we would call, “peasant” origin, although he had risen solidly into the working-middle class. He was from rural Virginia and his parents had been tobacco farmers. I spent two weeks or so every summer on the farm of my grandmother and step grandfather. They had no running water, no gas, a wood burning stove, no bathtubs or toilets but an outhouse, pot belly stoves for heat in the winter, a giant wood pile, a smoke house where hams and bacon hung, chickens, pigs, semi wild housecats that lived outdoors, no tractor or car, but an old plow horse and plows and other horse drawn implements, and electricity only after I was about 8 years old. The area did not have high schools for blacks and my father went as far as the seventh grade in a one room schoolhouse. All four of his grandparents, whom he had known as a child, had been born slaves. It was mainly because of World War II and urbanization that my father left that life.
They lived in a valley or hollow or “holler” in which all the landowners and tenants were black. In the morning if you wanted to talk to cousin Taft, you would walk down to behind the outhouse and yell across the valley, “Heeeyyyy Taaaaft,” and you could seem him far, far in the distance, come out of his cabin and yell back.
On the one hand, this was a pleasant situation because they lived in isolation from white people. On the other hand, they did have to leave the valley to go to town where all the rigid rules of Jim Crow applied. By the time I was little, my people had been in this country for six generations (going back, according to oral rendering of our genealogy, to Africa Jones and Mama Suki), much more under slavery than under freedom, and all of it under some form of racial terrorism, which had inculcated many humiliating behavior patterns.
Anyway that’s background. I think we were kind of typical as African Americans in the pre Civil Rights era went.
So anyway, I was having this argument with my father about Martin Luther King and how his message was too conservative compared to Malcolm X’s message. My father got really angry at me. It wasn’t that he disliked Malcolm X, but his point was that Malcolm X hadn’t accomplished anything as Dr. King had.
I was kind of sarcastic and asked something like, so what did Martin Luther King accomplish other than giving his “I have a dream speech.”
Before I tell you what my father told me, I want to digress. Because at this point in our amnesiac national existence, my question pretty much reflects the national civic religion view of what Dr. King accomplished. He gave this great speech. Or some people say, “he marched.” I was so angry at Mrs. Clinton during the primaries when she said that Dr. King marched, but it was LBJ who delivered the Civil Rights Act.
At this point, I would like to remind everyone exactly what Martin Luther King did, and it wasn’t that he “marched” or gave a great speech.
My father told me with a sort of cold fury, “Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south.”
Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this. If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don’t know what my father was talking about.
But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished. Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches.
He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.
I’m guessing that most of you, especially those having come fresh from seeing “The Help,” may not understand what this was all about. But living in the south (and in parts of the mid west and in many ghettos of the north) was living under terrorism.
It wasn’t that black people had to use a separate drinking fountain or couldn’t sit at lunch counters, or had to sit in the back of the bus.
You really must disabuse yourself of this idea. Lunch counters and buses were crucial symbolic planes of struggle that the civil rights movement decided to use to dramatize the issue, but the main suffering in the south did not come from our inability to drink from the same fountain, ride in the front of the bus or eat lunch at Woolworth’s.
It was that white people, mostly white men, occasionally went berserk, and grabbed random black people, usually men, and lynched them. You all know about lynching. But you may forget or not know that white people also randomly beat black people, and the black people could not fight back, for fear of even worse punishment.
This constant low level dread of atavistic violence is what kept the system running. It made life miserable, stressful and terrifying for black people.
White people also occasionally tried black people, especially black men, for crimes for which they could not conceivably be guilty. With the willing participation of white women, they often accused black men of “assault,” which could be anything from rape to not taking off one’s hat, to “reckless eyeballing.”
This is going to sound awful and perhaps a stain on my late father’s memory, but when I was little, before the civil rights movement, my father taught me many, many humiliating practices in order to prevent the random, terroristic, berserk behavior of white people. The one I remember most is that when walking down the street in New York City side by side, hand in hand with my hero-father, if a white woman approached on the same sidewalk, I was to take off my hat and walk behind my father, because he had been taught in the south that black males for some reason were supposed to walk single file in the presence of any white lady.
This was just one of many humiliating practices we were taught to prevent white people from going berserk.
I remember a huge family reunion one August with my aunts and uncles and cousins gathered around my grandparent’s vast breakfast table laden with food from the farm, and the state troopers drove up to the house with a car full of rifles and shotguns, and everyone went kind of weirdly blank. They put on the masks that black people used back then to not provoke white berserkness. My strong, valiant, self educated, articulate uncles, whom I adored, became shuffling, Step-N-Fetchits to avoid provoking the white men. Fortunately the troopers were only looking for an escaped convict. Afterward, the women, my aunts, were furious at the humiliating performance of the men, and said so, something that even a child could understand.
This is the climate of fear that Dr. King ended.
If you didn’t get taught such things, let alone experience them, I caution you against invoking the memory of Dr. King as though he belongs exclusively to you and not primarily to African Americans.
The question is, how did Dr. King do this — and of course, he didn’t do it alone.
(Of all the other civil rights leaders who helped Dr. King end this reign of terror, I think the most under appreciated is James Farmer, who founded the Congress of Racial Equality and was a leader of non-violent resistance, and taught the practices of non violent resistance.)
So what did they do?
They told us: — whatever you are most afraid of doing vis a vis white people, go do it. Go ahead down to city hall and try to register to vote, even if they say no, even if they take your name down.
Go ahead sit at that lunch counter. Sue the local school board. All things that most black people would have said back then, without exaggeration, were stark raving insane and would get you killed.
If we do it all together, we’ll be OK.
They made black people experience the worst of the worst, collectively, that white people could dish out, and discover that it wasn’t that bad. They taught black people how to take a beating — from the southern cops, from police dogs, from fire department hoses. They actually coached young people how to crouch, cover their heads with their arms and take the beating. They taught people how to go to jail, which terrified most decent people.
And you know what? The worst of the worst, wasn’t that bad.
Once people had been beaten, had dogs sicked on them, had fire hoses sprayed on them, and been thrown in jail, you know what happened?
These magnificent young black people began singing freedom songs in jail.
That, my friends, is what ended the terrorism of the south. Confronting your worst fears, living through it, and breaking out in a deep throated freedom song. The jailers knew they had lost when they beat the crap out of these young Negroes and the jailed, beaten young people began to sing joyously, first in one town then in another. This is what the writer, James Baldwin, captured like no other writer of the era.
Please let this sink in. It wasn’t marches or speeches. It was taking a severe beating, surviving and realizing that our fears were mostly illusory and that we were free.
So yes, Dr. King had many other goals, many other more transcendent, non-racial, policy goals, goals that apply to white people too, like ending poverty, reducing the war like aspects of our foreign policy, promoting the New Deal goal of universal employment, and so on. But his main accomplishment was ending 200 years of racial terrorism, by getting black people to confront their fears. So please don’t tell me that Martin Luther King’s dream has not been achieved, unless you knew what racial terrorism was like back then and can make a convincing case you still feel it today. If you did not go through that transition, you’re not qualified to say that the dream was not accomplished.
That is what Dr. King did — not march, not give good speeches. He crisscrossed the south organizing people, helping them not be afraid, and encouraging them, like Gandhi did in India, to take the beating that they had been trying to avoid all their lives.
Once the beating was over, we were free.
It wasn’t the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act or the Fair Housing Act that freed us. It was taking the beating and thereafter not being afraid. So, sorry Mrs. Clinton, as much as I admire you, you were wrong on this one. Our people freed ourselves and those Acts, as important as they were, were only white people officially recognizing what we had done.PS. I really shouldn’t have to add this but please — don’t ever confuse someone criticizing you or telling you bad things over the internet with what happened to people during the civil rights movement. Don’t. Just don’t do it. Don’t go there.
PSS Weird, but it kind of sounds like what V did to Evie.
UPDATE: There is a major, major hole in this essay as pointed out by FrankAletha downthread — While I was focusing on the effect on black men, she points out that similarly randomized sexual violence against black women was as severe and common and probably more so, because while violence against black men was ritualistic, violence against black women was routine.
Bravo, Mr. Rice. Bravo.
(H/T rootless_e at The People’s View)
[via DailyKos]
While reading discussions around the book & movie of “The Help” it ocurred to me that it was literally impossible for white people to understand what it was like being black in Mississippi in that time.
Until you know what it’s like to know that a bunch of marauding white men could break into your house AT ANY TIME with impunity and do whatever they goddamn well wanted to do to you. You had no recourse and they faced no punishment. Think about that for a while. Think about living with that terror. You weren’t even safe in your own home.
And in public it was much worse. Danger lurked everywhere.
I think a lot of folks think the problems in the milieu of “The Help” were about racial prejudice. They have no idea about the systematic brutalization and humiliations heaped on the heads of black folk.
I love this post. I wish more people would see it.
Wow…just wow!!!!!!
Pass the kleenex please. This is some powerful stuff. Thanks so much!
Bravo, indeed, Hamden Rice! I’ve known him for years on and off.. cyberally speaking, and here he is again with this beautifully written essay that I dare anyone to read without tears of sadness.
I’m definitely reposting it,via ABL, on our board, Democrats For Progress, where I saw him not too long ago.
Thank you for this, ABL..I might not have seen it otherwise.
There is nothing on this Earth that frightens me. Most Anglosdon’t believe me when I say it.When someone like my uncle can be assassinated – No guns, no security, no nothing will save anyone.
Just make sure that you make every day a good day to die. Sing your death song, and leave like a hero going home.
powerful comment.
This is powerful and amazing, ABL. Thank you for posting it. I sincerely hope (and I say this mostly without snark) that every Duraflame Firebagger reads it with an open mind and a shut mouth.
Duraflame Firebagger
Teehee. “Duraflame” I like it.
Hey, Stuck! Good to see you. Yep, it’s the Lipton Teabaggers and the Duraflame Firebaggers since they are both products and not really organic.
I’m just a dumb white boy that doesn’t really know what it’s like living under such terror and lack of any semblance of justice. I am not a civil rights activist, though I have always believed in them, for all.
I just know one thing. That the black man we have sitting in the WH right now is of great timber, regardless of his skin color. I don’t agree with everything he does, but I get the wavelength he broadcasts on. And I will fight any and all motherfuckers the best I can from unfair personal attacks on this man, whether racially motivated or not. And will mock any man woman or child who declares they know how to do it better. Let them be black and get elected president in THIS country. THEN Let them pass HCR when no one else has, FOR 100 FUCKING YEARS OF TRYING.
That is all, carry on.
“And I will fight any and all motherfuckers the best I can from unfair personal attacks on this man, whether racially motivated or not. And will mock any man woman or child who declares they know how to do it better. Let them be black and get elected president in THIS country. THEN Let them pass HCR when no one else has, FOR 100 FUCKING YEARS OF TRYING.”
Yep.
I can guarantee that those who think they could do it better than Obama wouldn’t last 15 minutes sitting at the desk in the Oval Office. They would run out with hot liquid running down their legs.
And for those who thought–or think–that Obama “had it easy” running for President (or his whole political career), seriously, lend me some of that fine weed you’ve been smoking, because that’s just amazingly f**king delusional.
A friend from college posted the following on Facebook in response to this post:
“When a skinny black guy with a funny name becomes President of the U.S. while people who lived under Jim Crow are still alive…I’m not black and I’m not MLK, but seriously. What do people think he was trying to do?”
I love it.
Wow – what a quote – and what truth :)
Like many young Black men, I failed to realize how much King had accomplished and felt he was the the preferred Negro over Malcolm the ‘true’ champion. I know now that though Malcolm was a great leader and significant champion for our people, he wouldn’t have been half as powerful with King. And King’s message of peace and justice would not be as powerful with Malcolm’s firebrand nature. It was symbiotic and necessary for our struggle.
I now realize that Dr. King was the greatest American produce – a man who was willing to literally stand up and die for our people’s freedom. He didn’t use guns or threats – he used the power of words and the strength to face evil with love. He set out to galvanize all men (not just Black men, though primarily our people) to fight for justice through the power of peace.
If Dr. King were alive today, he’d probably have a few issues with Obama, but he’d be more disappointed with the so-called Negro leaders who have trampled and prostituted his name and life for power and profit. I personally think he’d have more issues with Tavis and the CBC than Obama. He’d be particularly miffed at his former protege, Messy Jesse. Just a thought.
I agree with all or most of this.
“Messy Jesse”? Wow. That is hilarious.
For me, both MLK and Malcolm X are powerful, but for different reasons. While King was combatting the laws and local customs that oppressed blacks, Malcolm was dealing with the personal impact of this oppression. Malcolm was also dealing with the effects of this within the black community. This is part of the reason why I identify more with Malcolm than King. Yet, King was just as important (if not more so). King was directly challenging the societal framework that created the personal demons Malcolm was fighting against in the first place.
The thing is that Malcolm was killed before he had a chance to impact society in a similar way as King. I find it interesting that Malcolm died after seeing the serious flaws of the Nation of Islam and right after forming his own organization. Then, King was killed right before he was getting ready to deal with issues of poverty and workers’ rights. Both of these men died right when they were getting ready to launch the next stage of the struggle.
Yes, I’ve also grown to appreciate MLK more in recent years. I also saw him as the “acceptable” negro while Malcolm was the “true” champion. Yet, when you look at how MLK has been sanitized by the MSM over the years – this is to be expected.
This is a great post. I’ve never seen a point like this laid out so well. Very moving. Bravo!
Great post. As the grandfather in “Invisible Man” said, “Learn it to the younguns.”
I’ve believed for a long time that much of the hope for America died in that horrible year 1968.
It’s only been in the last few years that it seemed as though some measure of a moral compass was returning. And now, when I look at the breadth and depth of the hatred shown President Obama from different quarters, my mind reels.
Let us remember not only Dr. King’s strength, let us also remember his wisdom, as strength without wisdom is far too easily led wrong.
(Written by a graying, middle-aged white guy.)
Thank you very much for reposting this! I’ve been a fan of your blog for a long time and I’m honored that you liked my piece!
HR
Hamden! It’s brilliant. Very powerful. Thank you for writing it!
Sir, you said beautifully and powerfully what I tried to say when I was 14, living in deep South Georgia, seeing so much wrong with segregation. I knew from overhearing things that my people were terrorizing your people, but never having even been face to face with a black person, I had no credibility. Sadly, my relatives still think that. But if justice doesn’t exist for all, how can it exist for any? And how can a person claim to be Christian while denying love and compassion to entire groups of people, the “others”?
Thank you for writing this very insightful piece. I will be including it as part of my coursework on MLK and X at the college I teach at. I hope in enlarges my student’s minds and understanding.
Thank you, Hamden. I’ve reposted to my FB page and it’s just magnificent.
Some of the most important and powerful words I’ve read! Hope to read more from you! Thank you Hamden!
In “They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee,” a book about the lunch counter sit-ins, reported that a third of the students were beaten. They weren’t the walk in the park that we think of when we think of Americans demonstrating.
Thank you for sharing your story with us.
Thank you so much ABL for posting this – and thank you so much Mr. Rice for writing it.
…
I’ve been trying to come up with some way of praising this post more, but I can’t do it – my words won’t do it justice. Just, thank you. Thank you very, very much.
As a black person, this was very insightful for me and something I hadn’t thought too deeply about. I knew fear was always an issue for black people back then. I didn’t make the connection that MLK was saying you can take the pain. You can feel it and keep going. He brought the fear of pain out into the open. Black people didn’t have to be ashamed of their fear now. He also shined a light on what was going on in the South. Alot of the behaviors that were done in collusion and isolation were now visible around the country. That was the power of the kkk. They were hidden and had strength in numbers. What MLK gave us was visibility and strength in numbers. Now that it was out in the open, we were free to fight back out in the open.
Thanks Mr. Rice. Your diary was very enlightening.
I will proudly fly my flag tomorrow to honor a great republcan Freedom Fighter…MLK
Thank you for posting this, ABL. I’m humbled and inspired and grateful to Mr. Rice for everything he communicated in this piece.
Thank you for posting. Quite an eye-opener. I think, aside from the MAIN message, there is a good lesson for all – in the face of problems – Take the Beating – it’s not that bad – you will get through it and be free. Something to think about – thank you.
As a 40-something Californian white guy, I was very sheltered from all of this. My generation was really the first generation systematically indoctrinated against the de facto racism that was simply accepted in my parents’s generation and prior. We were taught about the marches and the sit-ins and the speeches and the jails and the injustices. We were taught about the lynchings, yes – but those were made to sound like exceptional events, rather than only the most visible symptom of a total environment of fear and terror.
I never really knew. I appreciate being raised by progressive parents who treated everyone as equal, sure, but perhaps something was missing from the message. After all, maybe white people don’t really want to dig up ALL that shit all the time, right? Who knows? All I know is that I still have two school age children. We live in a community where we’re the numerical minority (by 4-1) yet still the economic and political majority. Somehow I don’t want them to miss this part of the message. Their school activities focus on the speech, and the beautiful and positive part of the message. That’s all well and good. But how much more meaningful would those positives be if they had a better grasp of the dark side of the conversation. If they understood that we as white people, who have power beyond our numbers still in this country, have a responsibility be the agents peace and fight the terror of the recent past, to work to heal the wounds of our collective past and not just pretend that those are the bad old days and everything’s really pretty good now…
Things are better, sure – because of MLK especially, but we have so far to go. Thank you for posting this. It made me cry out of anger, sadness, frustration, gratitude, and even hope. Well done Hamden Rice.
What Martin Really Did | My Ready Room
Please go and read the whole thing; it is the best tribute to Dr. King you will see today, or any day…
Thanks for posting this. Most of us middle-class white kids only ever heard about the speeches and the marches in school growing up, and even in the better history classes I’ve taken, the discussion of violence was mostly focused around violence against black people when they marched. I doubt it ever occurred to any of the teachers (all white, of course) that there was more to the story. The fundamental question about what was life really like for black people in the south was never directly examined.
Even though it’s impossible for me to really understand what it was like, never having lived under such inexcusable threat of random unprovoked violence myself, it’s still an important lesson that us white folk need to learn as best as we can, so we who haven’t shared your suffering can be better brothers and sisters to you. Thanks for sharing the truth. Keep sharing it until everybody knows it, and beyond.
P.S. I disagree with Obama on several points, but on his worst day he’s light years ahead of the very best of the GOP on their very best day.
Mind you, white men passing a white woman on the sidewalk would have been expected to drop to single file, too, but as a practical courtesy rather than out of deference and fear. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Everyone danced the dance of Southern politesse, but for very different reasons.
The respect shown to white women was because they were the property of their men, not for their own sake, and the violence white men perpetrated against black men in the name of protecting white women was for the same reason. Because white women weren’t safe from being beaten by men, just from being beaten by black men. A different dimension of oppression in the multi-faceted culture.
I’m white and middle-aged. I grew up in the sixties. I’d say that I watched the riots, the violence on television, but I didn’t pay attention.
I didn’t know the terror then. I’ll never know the terror. But I should be aware that the terror was there. I am now.
Thank you for sharing this.
Thanks so much for posting this, ABL, and helping ensure that Mr. Rice’s wonderful essay gets to a wider audience.
I’ve had the privilege of hearing Charles Sherrod speak about his work with SNCC and the Albany Movement, and one of the things that has really stuck with me is his explanation that SNCC very consciously organized young people because they knew that the older generations were just too accustomed to living in fear to be persuaded that there was any point to taking action, BUT if the younger generation would step forward, the older generations would eventually join them because they would not sit back and let the beating and jailing of their children go unprotested. Charles, of course, said this much more eloquently and clearly than I have.
Important words. I’d just like to underline the statement that King didn’t do it alone. There were so many others that did the work and haven’t received the credit King has. The remarkable Dr. King has become the symbol for that moment in our history, but so many others gave just as much, worked just as hard. And so many are forgotten.
One of that era’s greatest heroes is Bayard Rustin, who really brought the strategy of Gandhian non-violent protest to the movement, and organized the March on Washington, among other tremendously important things. Many feel that the movement couldn’t have succeeded the way it did without his many contributions to it. He – and so any others – deserve to be remembered right alongside King.
It’s also worth remembering that Dr. King and his colleagues were the heirs to a long tradition of struggle for the rights of African-Americans that stretches back to the days of slavery. The modern (post-1954) Civil Rights movement did not come out of nowhere.
Also, and this is perhaps just my opinion, but I think that part of the reason for the success of Dr. King & Co.’s work was that the time was ripe for their tactics to work. The country was feeling virtuous because of World War II and the white part of it, at least, was enjoying unprecedented prosperity, which made them less comfortable with people being beaten up, especially when it was being shown to them in their living rooms on TV. I suspect that the same tactics would have been less effective in the days when pogroms that wiped out entire African-American communities barely rated a mention in the paper.
This is not in any way to disparage Dr. King’s work: a large part of what makes a leader great is knowing which battles can be won. (For some reason, Tolstoy’s portrayal of Kutuzov during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia comes to mind.) It is rather to say that we should also honor the bravery and vision of earlier leaders whose legacies are perhaps less obvious today.
I also think that the uncles in the family reunion story deserve at least some understanding and some defending. Even today, in New York City, an African-American man is well advised to act submissive when confronted by a police officer, if he doesn’t want to be arrested or worse. (Actually, it’s not bad advice to anybody, as the Occupy Wall Street folks have discovered.) It’s one thing to confront the police when you’ve got a group who has planned things in advance and has a definite (hopefully achievable) goal in mind. It’s another when they just drop in on a day when you just want to live your life in peace.
Timing is important. It always has been. The timing of the Civil Rights movement was also good because 1) SCOTUS had ruled segregation was unconstitutional in the ’50s and 2)it had been 100 years since the 14th Amendment was passed. So, technically, it was King and the protesters who were behaving legally. It was those opposed to them who were breaking the law. So, not only did King have the upperhand morally, but legally too.
Loved this article! Brought tears to my eyes. I’m a white woman. I went to see “The Help” at a theater becuz my black friend was reading the book and wanted to see it. I was game becuz the previews looked interesting (I would’ve just as soon waited for it to come out on the movie channels). I found it entertaining but after we left the theater I said to my friend, “That movie was completely inaccurate. Those women would’ve been found at the bottom of a lake – even the white one – if they had done something like that back then.” My friend looked angry at me for saying that which baffled me. “The Help” was like if someone took a story about the holocaust and made it look like the Japanese internment camps in the US rather then what actually happened! Anyway, thank you for sharing this very educating piece. A few years ago I dated a young, black man and we went to the Lincoln Memorial and he said to me, “Didn’t he do something for our people?” I almost fell over! He could tell me everything about current rap celebs but didn’t know anything about Lincoln, the civil rights movement, etc. I thought it was terrible! I hope more of the older black generation will educate the younger ones (as this article does so well) because this history should NEVER be forgotten.
I’d like to know what he would have thought of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with or without the knowledge that blacks are disproportionately a part of the most at-risk fighting forces in the US army. He was not a one-issue man by any means.
In some alternate reality, THIS man was the first black president. Somebody just zigged when they should have zagged so long ago.
When people talk about King vs. X like they are… two opposites, one representing love and one hate, or at least pacifism vs. militance, I kind of think of that as a great oversimplification. They were both evolving and developing philosophies throughout their experience, and X was becoming much more open-minded, before their lives were snuffed. Either way, the “revenge” or at least “circle the wagons” mindset of the NOI, X and his followers was a normal and natural response to an ongoing attack on multiple fronts if not an ideal solution; it’s Dr. King that managed to step up to teach the “turn(ing of) the other cheek” and actually make it work somehow. Ordinary vs. extraordinary, not right vs. wrong exactly. Who really expects someone to turn the other cheek? We don’t judge people who punch back. If someone manages to pull it off, though, we should be impressed.
Also, as a general point, everyone is qualified to have an opinion about everything. It’s just that some are more informed about specific things because of their experience or training.
Anne Moody’s “Coming of Age in Mississippi” is a good resource for getting an idea of what this terror was like in daily life, and how the civil rights movement challenged it.
Obama the puppet has nothing on the great man that was MLK who continues to inspire me