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July 29 - July 29, 2020
but few observers realized it or were prepared for its implications.
White Americans left the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor.
they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared.
Negro and white have a fundamentally different definition.
The days can never be forgotten when the brutalities at Selma caused thousands all over the land to rush to our side, heedless of danger and of differences in race, class and religion.
After twelve years, barely 12 percent school integration existed in the whole South, and in the Deep South the figure hardly reached 2 percent.
First, the line of progress is never straight.
The cohesive political structure of the South working through this alliance enabled a minority of the population to imprint its ideology on the nation’s laws.
The fight is far from over, because it is neither won, as some assert, nor lost, as the calamity-ridden declare.
Yet nonviolent resistance caused no explosions of anger—it instigated no riots—it
Nonviolent direct action had proved to be the most effective generator of change that the movement had seen, and by 1965 all civil rights organizations had embraced it as theirs.
We forgot what we knew daily in the South: freedom is not given, it is won.
Both must now be sustained.
Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering.
But on the other hand, it cannot be taken for granted that Negroes will adhere to nonviolence under any and all conditions.
and Negroes must sympathize with whites who feel menaced by them.
Indeed, Negroes are themselves no less menaced,
He has to resist the impulse to seize upon the rioter as the exclusive villain.
he reserves his resentment only for the Negro, he will be the victim by allowing those who have the greatest culpability to evade responsibility.
Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the hands of the white community.
should have been reminded that disappointment produces despair and despair produces bitterness, and that the one thing certain about bitterness is its blindness.
The answer was only to be found in persistent trying, perpetual experimentation, persevering togetherness.
White allies have been in question since the beginning .
Like life, racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create.
And so the ability of Negroes and whites to work together, to understand each other, will not be found ready-made; it must be created by the fact of contact.
Along these lines, I implored everyone in the room to see the morality of making the march completely interracial.
I had the deep feeling that it was an unfortunate choice of words for a slogan.
For five long hours I pleaded
“That is just the point,” I answered. “No one has ever heard the Jews publicly chant a slogan of Jewish power, but they have power.
Stokely concluded by saying, with candor, “Martin, I deliberately decided to raise this issue on the march in order to give it a national forum, and force you to take a stand for Black Power.” I laughed. “I have been used before,” I said to Stokely. “One more time won’t hurt.”
First, it is necessary to understand that Black Power is a cry of disappointment.
Stokely Carmichael now says that nonviolence is irrelevant, it is because he, as a dedicated veteran of many battles, has seen with his own eyes the most brutal white violence against Negroes and white civil rights workers, and he has seen it go unpunished.
MLK defends him even though he used him. Solidity
Their frustration is further fed by the fact that even when blacks and whites die together in the cause of justice, the death of the white person gets more attention and concern than the death of the black person.
mention that one person, James Reeb,
The parents and sister of Jimmy received no flowers from the President.
Indeed, one of the great problems that the Negro confronts is his lack of power.
The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed.
Black Power assumes that Negroes will be slaves unless there is a new power to counter the force of the men who are still determined to be masters rather than brothers.
Those in the Black Power movement who contend that blacks should cut themselves off from every level of dependence upon whites for advice, money or other help are obviously reacting against the slave pattern of “perfect dependence” upon the masters.
Tough love?
He must stand up amid a system that still oppresses him and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of his own value. He must no longer be ashamed of being black.
The history books, which have almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history,
All too many Negroes and whites are unaware of the fact that the first American to shed blood in the revolution which freed this country from British oppression was a black seaman named Crispus Attucks. Negroes
I wept for my children and all black children who have been denied a knowledge of their heritage;
I wept for all white children, who, through daily miseducation, are taught that the Negro is an irrelevant entity in American society;
They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare.
We Negroes, who have dreamed for so long of freedom, are still confined in a prison of segregation and discrimination.
only nine have a majority of Negroes.
Moreover, any program that elects all black candidates simply because they are black and rejects all white candidates simply because they are white is politically unsound and morally unjustifiable.
Just as the Negro cannot achieve political power in isolation, neither can he gain economic power through separatism.
The history of the movement reveals that Negro-white alliances have played a powerfully constructive role, especially in recent years.
American Negro is neither totally African nor totally Western.
