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* Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. March 14, 1968…
Now I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames. And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I’m absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.
Now every year about this time, our newspapers and our televisions and people generally start talking about the long hot summer ahead. What always bothers me is that the long hot summer has always been preceded by a long cold winter. And the great problem is that the nation has not used its winters creatively enough to develop the program, to develop the kind of massive acts of concern that will bring about a solution to the problem. And so we must still face the fact that our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nations winters of delay. As long as justice is postponed we always stand on the verge of these darker nights of social disruption. The question now, is whether America is prepared to do something massively, affirmatively and forthrightly about the great problem we face in the area of race and the problem which can bring the curtain of doom down on American civilization if it is not solved. And I would like to talk for the next few minutes about some of the things that must be done if we are to solve this problem.
The first thing I would like to mention is that there must be a recognition on the part of everybody in this nation that America is still a racist country. Now however unpleasant that sounds, it is the truth. And we will never solve the problem of racism until there is a recognition of the fact that racism still stands at the center of so much of our nation and we must see racism for what it is. It is the nymph of an inferior people. It is the notion that one group has all of the knowledge, all of the insights, all of the purity, all of the work, all of the dignity. And another group is worthless, on a lower level of humanity, inferior. To put it in philosophical language, racism is not based on some empirical generalization which, after some studies, would come to conclusion that these people are behind because of environmental conditions. Racism is based on an ontological affirmation. It is the notion that the very being of a people is inferior. And their ultimate logic of racism is genocide. Hitler was a very sick man. He was one of the great tragedies of history. But he was very honest. He took his racism to its logical conclusion. The minute his racism caused him to sickly feel and go about saying that there was something innately inferior about the Jew he ended up killing six million Jews. The ultimate logic of racism is genocide, and if one says that one is not good enough to have a job that is a solid quality job, if one is not good enough to have access to public accommodations, if one is not good enough to have the right to vote, if one is not good enough to live next door to him, if one is not good enough to marry his daughter because of his race. Then at that moment that person is saying that that person who is not good to do all of this is not fit to exist or to live. And that is the ultimate logic of racism. And we’ve got to see that this still exists in American society. And until it is removed, there will be people walking the streets of live and living in their humble dwellings feeling that they are nobody, feeling that they have no dignity and feeling that they are not respected. The first thing that must be on the agenda of our nation is to get rid of racism.
Secondly, we’ve got to get rid of two or three myths that still pervade our nation. One is the myth of time. I’m sure you’ve heard this notion. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And I’ve heard it from many sincere people. They’ve said to the negro and/to his allies in the white community you should slow up, you’re pushing things too fast, only time can solve the problem. And if you’ll just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out. There is an answer to that myth. It is the time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I’m sad to say to you tonight I’m absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the forces on the wrong side in our nation, the extreme righteous of our nation have often used time much more effectively than the forces of good will and it may well be that we may have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words of the bad people who will say bad things in a meeting like this or who will bomb a church in Birmingham, Alabama, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say wait on time. Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability, it comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. And so we must always help time and realize that the time is always right to do right.
Now there is another myth and that is the notion that legislation can’t solve the problem that you’ve got to change the heart and naturally I believe in changing the heart. I happen to be a Baptist preacher and that puts me in the heart changing business and Sunday after Sunday I’m preaching about conversion and the need for the new birth and re-generation. I believe that there’s something wrong with human nature. I believe in original sin not in terms of the historical event but as the mythological category to explain the universality of evil, so I’m honest enough to see the gone-wrongness of human nature so naturally I’m not against changing the heart and I do feel that that is the half truth involved here, that there is some truth in the whole question of changing the heart. We are not going to have the kind of society that we should have until the white person treats the negro right - not because the law says it but because it’s natural because it’s right and because the black man is the white man’s brother. I’ll be the first to say that we will never have a truly integrated society, a truly colorless society until men and women are obedient to the unenforceable. But after saying that, let me point out the other side. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.
And so while legislation may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men when it’s vigorously enforced and when you change the habits of people pretty soon attitudes begin to be changed and people begin to see that they can do things that fears caused them to feel that they could never do. And I say that there’s a need still for strong civil rights legislation in various areas. There’s legislation in Congress right now dealing with the whole question of housing and equal administration of justice and these things are very important for I submit to you tonight that there is no more dangerous development in our nation than the constant building up of predominantly negro central cities ringed by white suburbs. This will do nothing but invite social disaster. And this problem has to be dealt with - some through legislation, some through education, but it has to be dealt with in a very concrete and meaningful manner.
Now let me get back to my point. I’m going to finish my speech. I’ve been trying to think about what I’m going to preach about tomorrow down to Central Methodist Church in the Lenten series and I think 1′11 use as the text, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
I want to deal with another myth briefly which concerns me and I want to talk about it very honestly and that is over-reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. Now certainly it’s very important for people to engage in self-help programs and do all they can to lift themselves by their own bootstraps. Now I’m not talking against that at all. I think there is a great deal that the black people of this country must do for themselves and that nobody else can do for them. And we must see the other side of this question. I remember the other day I was on a plane and a man starting talking with me and he said I’m sympathetic toward what you’re trying to do, but I just feel that you people don’t do enough for yourself and then he went on to say that my problem is, my concern is that I know of other ethnic groups, many of the ethnic groups that came to this country and they had problems just as negroes and yet they did the job for themselves, they lifted themselves by their own bootstraps. Why is it that negroes can’t do that? And I looked at him and I tried to talk as understanding as possible but I said to him, it does not help the negro for unfeeling, sensitive white people to say that other ethnic groups that came to the country maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty years voluntarily have gotten ahead of them and he was brought here in chains involuntarily almost three hundred and fifty years ago. I said it doesn’t help him to be told that and then I went on to say to this gentlemen that he failed to recognize that no other ethnic group has been enslaved on American soil. Then I had to go on to say to him that you failed to realize that America made the black man’s color a stigma. Something that he couldn’t change. Not only was the color a stigma, but even linguistic then stigmatic conspired against the black man so that his color was thought of as something very evil. If you open Roget’s Thesaurus and notice the synonym for black you’ll find about a hundred and twenty and most of them represent something dirty, smut, degrading, low, and when you turn to the synonym for white, about one hundred and thirty, all of them represent something high, pure, chaste. You go right down that list. And so in the language a white life is a little better than a black life. Just follow. If somebody goes wrong in the family, we don’t call him a white sheep we call him a black sheep. And then if you block somebody from getting somewhere you don’t say they’ve been whiteballed, you say they’ve been blackballed. And just go down the line. It’s not whitemail it’s blackmail. I tell you this to seriously say that the nation made the black man’s color a stigma and then I had to say to my friend on the plane another thing that is often forgotten in this country. That nobody, no ethnic group has completely lifted itself by it own bootstraps. I can never forget that the black man was free from the bondage of physical slavery in 1863. He wasn’t given any land to make that freedom meaningful after being held in slavery 244 years. And it was like keeping a man in prison for many many years and then coming to see that he is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. Alright good night and God bless you.
And I was about to say that to free, to have freed the negro from slavery without doing anything to get him started in life on a sound economic footing, it was almost like freeing a man who had been in prison many years and you had discovered that he was unjustly convicted of, that he was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted and you go up to him and say now you’re free, but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town or you don’t give him any money to buy some clothes to put on his back or to get started in life again. Every code of jurisprudence would rise up against it. This is the very thing that happened to the black man in America. And then when we look at it even deeper than this, it becomes more ironic. We’re reaping the harvest of this failure today. While America refused to do anything for the black man at that point, during that very period, the nation, through an act of Congress, was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and the mid-west, which meant that it was willing to under gird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. Not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges for them to learn how to farm. Not only that it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming and went beyond this and came to the point of providing low interest rates for these persons so that they could mechanize their farms, and today many of these persons are being paid millions of dollars a year in federal subsidies not to farm and these are so often the very people saying to the black man that he must lift himself by his own bootstraps. I can never think … Senator Eastland, incidentally, who says this all the time gets a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year, not to farm on various areas of his plantation down in Mississippi. And yet he feels that we must do everything for ourselves. Well that appears to me to be a kind of socialism for the rich and rugged hard individualistic capitalism for the poor.
posted by Rich Miller
Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 10:32 am
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The analogy in the last paragraph is still relevant. What good is it to be released from prison if you are destitute?
I have wondered about the prisoners released from prisons and jails due to the COVID-19 pandemic. What resources were those released provided with? How could they make it on their own without housing or funds?
Comment by Practical Politics Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 10:43 am
A must read for those who think “all lives matter” is the only response to “black lives matter.”
Comment by Steve Rogers Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 10:45 am
“…And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”
this still rings true today, 52 years later. and what a shameful tragedy that is.
Comment by WeAreAVillage Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 10:49 am
Very inspirational. It’s time to expose and remove the harmful myths of our country. Rugged individualism is one of them. For one, it’s easy to be a “rugged individualist” when the system is rigged by and for those demanding this of the disadvantaged. It’s hypocritical too because we live in a modern society where we all use and have to pay for public goods and services.
Economic justice is a big part of social and racial justice. Dr. King knew it and paid the ultimate price trying to bring it about. Nowhere in the world, among leading countries, are there large efforts to repeal universal health insurance and strip away workers‘ rights like there are in America. We rank very high in income disparity and very low in worker protections. We have the most expensive healthcare and the fewest insured of all leading countries. It’s time we stop these efforts that disadvantage so many for the benefit of those who have so much.
Comment by Grandson of Man Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 10:54 am
The bootstraps myth really dies hard. I’m in my 30s and still hear it from people my age.
Comment by Excitable Boy Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 10:55 am
Sadly, we don’t listen to the words when they are spoken. For it is often an inconvenient truth we are unprepared to hear. It is only after things have become worse do we look back and realize that the path had been laid out for us but we chose not to take it.
Comment by Norseman Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 10:57 am
===It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.===
Less than a month later he was dead.
A victim of the same hate we experience today. A victim of the same racism that lead to four public employees participating in the cold blooded murder of a helpless bound man. A murder paid for by the taxpayer.
A victim of the same society where all manner of white folks want to support, rationalize, or explain away that murder and all of the other murders at the hands of their public servants that go unpunished.
This needs to be addressed, and addressed without mercy and after we have stripped cops of the confidence they have to commit murder and destroy evidence of their crimes we can explore some of the other depths of our society’s racism.
For example, all of those state agencies that shut down early in Springfield and in their other offices because they were concerned about black protesters, even though they were planned for miles away.
Springfield has never successfully addressed their community’s long history of racism, and that is where we draw on for so many of our public servants and so many of our state officials.
We need to hold some folks accountable to their bigotry, unconscious or not.
Illinois is a land of sundown towns and lynchings. Illinois is a land where slave holders are honored for their contributions with the horrors they inflicted on others ignored and we need to stop pretending that because Lincoln happened to live here that we don’t have the history that we have and the blind eyes that we have to the wrongs we have committed and the wrongs we continue to commit.
We’re the land where we had to stop executing death row inmates because so many of our elected prosecutors framed and convicted innocent black men.
We’re a land where vehement and vocal racists own the Chicago Cubs but we celebrate them throwing meaningless and action-less words on their stadium.
We failed to address this 52 years ago when these words were freshly spoken. We failed to address this 52 years ago when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. The crimes we have committed, the injustices we have committed, and those that we have allowed others to commit without holding them to account continued.
And here we are. 52 years later. Are we more capable of looking in the mirror?
Because if we can’t see what we are, I don’t know how we expect to actually fix it.
Comment by Candy Dogood Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 11:05 am
I’m always down for reading and hearing Dr. King. I’d like to see more folks reading Malcolm X too. He was for nonviolence too. He said “We are nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us.” Peace.
Comment by Hawkeye J Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 11:08 am
I too have a dream, where we can see the symbiotic relationship between the individual and state and transcend polarizing economic labels, where we can learn to find the best in economic systems and try to blend them together.
Comment by Grandson of Man Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 11:10 am
“Well that appears to me to be a kind of socialism for the rich and rugged hard individualistic capitalism for the poor.”
Comment by Ok Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 11:16 am
So powerful. Last night I stayed up late reading and watching an earlier, more extended version of this speech, given at Stanford Univ. in April 1967.
The earlier speech includes this prescient line: “And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”
Perhaps now we will stop postponing justice.
https://www.crmvet.org/docs/otheram.htm
Comment by Pot calling kettle Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 11:22 am
– I submit to you tonight that there is no more dangerous development in our nation than the constant building up of predominantly negro central cities ringed by white suburbs. This will do nothing but invite social disaster. And this problem has to be dealt with - some through legislation, some through education, but it has to be dealt with in a very concrete and meaningful manner.–
Looking at you, Chicago. And … WBEZ for the win:
https://interactive.wbez.org/2020/banking/disparity/
I’d also like to recommend Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), from which comes the following:
“… the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’”
Comment by dbk Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 11:25 am
I 100% endorse dbk’s recommendation.
Comment by Montrose Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 12:10 pm
It is very depressing that this same speech could be given today with very little change to it.
Comment by West Side the Best Side Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 12:33 pm
It’s long past time for meaningful legislative changes. Police training requires major changes. Education, job training and mental health support are required. Dr. King was right. Until we address racism in all areas we will continue to wake up to more sickening murders of blacks by police and more riots.
Comment by Froganon Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 12:39 pm
from dbk’s response about a black central city surrounded by rings of white suburbs.
Today, the picture is more complicated though. The city of Chicago itself is about evenly balanced population wise. The suburbs are varied with predominately block ones like Markham and Harvey, predominately LatinX ones like Berwyn and Cicero, mixed ones like North Riverside and Forest Park.
Comment by cermak_rd Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 12:47 pm
Curse it, I meant Black of course, not block.
Comment by cermak_rd Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 12:56 pm
No justice. No peace.
Know justice. Know peace.
Comment by MG85 Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 1:01 pm
My Dr. King reading this morning. Again, with minor modification, could be given today.
https://www.apa.org/monitor/features/king-challenge
Comment by West Sider Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 1:53 pm
Rich, wow, thank you for this. I’m still trying to come to an understanding how these words that long ago could’ve easily been words we could’ve heard in these past days.
I read these words now, in a different context to what these days have been, the empathy, the emotions brought out in me, they are now rising as I haven’t felt the pains and injustices, the words showing how society sees the word “black”, black sheep, blackballed, and how, even now, we are, I know I am, in need of more learning, and committing to be better and way beyond that, end social injustice.
This is must read.
Comment by Oswego Willy Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 2:17 pm
-cermak_rd-
Actually, the situation is less complicated than it may appear. Chicago is more integrated at the city level but not at the neighborhood level. HOPE VI spread low-income African Americans more homogeneously across the city, but not the North Side. So increased segregation by income and wealth corresponds to persistent racial segregation:
https://www.wbez.org/stories/the-middle-class-is-shrinking-everywhere-in-chicago-its-almost-gone/e63cb407-5d1e-41b1-9124-a717d4fb1b0b
The Middle Class Is Shrinking Everywhere — In Chicago It’s Almost Gone
Half of Chicago’s census tracts were considered middle income in 1970. Today, that’s down to 16 percent.
The same is true with the suburbs. Sociologists have found that increased residential segregation by income in the suburbs corresponds to greater racial segregation, as well. The result is a pattern in which ’suburb’ has the same significance that ‘urban neighborhood’ used to have. Source:
D. T. Lichter, D. Parisi, M. C. Taquino. Toward a New Macro-Segregation? Decomposing Segregation within and between Metropolitan Cities and Suburbs. American Sociological Review, 2015; 80 (4): 843 DOI: 10.1177/0003122415588558
Not so different at all.
Comment by Comma Chameleon Wednesday, Jun 3, 20 @ 2:19 pm
-cermak_rd-
The article was on home lending patterns in all Chicago neighborhoods 2012-2018.
Over that period, more money was lent and more loans were made in Lincoln Park than in all black-majority neighborhoods combined.
Three of the big banks (BoA, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan) in seven years made a total of 33 loans in black-majority neighborhoods. That works out to an average of 1.6 loan per year per bank in black-majority neighborhoods.
The article included a map of Chicago’s neighborhoods color-coded for “security” from 80 years ago - i.e. a redlined map.
Composition of some neighborhoods has changed, but the overall and very stark pattern of “safe” and “unsafe” loan neighborhoods remains the same.
Comment by dbk Thursday, Jun 4, 20 @ 1:09 am