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Although white southerners lost the Civil War, they did not lose the cultural war—the struggle to define America as a white nation and blacks as a subordinate race unfit for governing and therefore incapable of political and social equality. In the white imagination, the image of black men was transformed from docile slaves and harmless “Sambos,” to menacing “black beast rapists,” the most serious threat to the virtue of white women and the sanctity of the white home. The image of black women was changed from nurturing “Negro mammies” to salacious Jezebels, nearly as corrupting to white
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“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”[9]
“It is hardly a moral act to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure,”
“Better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees.”
“Freedom is not free.”
“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
When King agreed to act as the most visible leader in the civil rights movement, he recognized what was at stake. In taking up the cross of black leadership, he was nearly overwhelmed with fear. This fear reached a climax on a particular night, January 27, 1956, in the early weeks of the Montgomery bus boycott, when he received a midnight telephone call threatening to blow up his house if he did not leave Montgomery in three days. Later he told how that call created a “spiritual midnight,” as he thought about what could happen to him, his wife, and newly born baby girl. Later recalling this
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“Strangely enough,” he said later, “I accepted the word of the bombing calmly. My religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it.” When an angry crowd of blacks gathered with guns ready for revenge, King raised his hand and calmed them, saying, “We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. . . . We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them.” As King saw it, the
And my great prayer is always that God will save me from the paralysis of crippling fear, because I think when a person lives with the fear of the consequences for his personal life, he can never do anything in terms of lifting the whole of humanity and solving many of the social problems that we confront.
Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door which leads man into life eternal. Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be your sustaining power during these trying days.
“Justice delayed is justice denied.”
Christ is a nigger, Beaten and black— Oh, bare your back. Mary is His mother, Mammy of the South, Silence your mouth. God is His father— White Master above Grant Him your love. Most holy bastard Of the bleeding mouth, Nigger Christ On the cross of the South.
Every time a white mob lynched a black person, they lynched Jesus. The lynching tree is the cross in America. When American Christians realize that they can meet Jesus only in the crucified bodies in our midst, they will encounter the real scandal of the cross.
Nothing is more racist in America’s criminal justice system than its administration of the death penalty. America is the only industrialized country in the West where the death penalty is still legal. Most countries regard it as both immoral and barbaric. But not in America. The death penalty is primarily reserved, though not exclusively, for people of color, and white supremacy shows no signs of changing it. That is why the term “legal lynching”[14] is still relevant today. One can lynch a person without a rope or tree.
Just as the Germans should never forget the Holocaust, Americans should never forget slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree.
