- Mar 11, 2015
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Even Though He Is Revered Today, MLK Was Widely Disliked by the American Public When He Was Killed
Seventy-five percent of Americans disapproved of the civil rights leader as he spoke out against the Vietnam War and economic disparity
Even Though He Is Revered Today, MLK Was Widely Disliked by the American Public When He Was Killed
Seventy-five percent of Americans disapproved of the civil rights leader as he spoke out against the Vietnam War and economic disparity
www.smithsonianmag.com
It's time the lies stopped. A white man murdered King. A right wing racist. So spare us the right wing opinion of what King meant. People here are running their mouths about modern blacks and riots:
Here is what King said about that.
"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."
King said that more than 50 years ago. There are whites who still don't hear, then mouth off about the riots their refusal to listen have caused. There are whites here running their mouths about reparations:
Here is what King said about that.
“Few people consider the fact that in addition to being enslaved for two centuries, the Negro was during all those years robbed of the wages of his toil. No amount of gold could provide an adequate compensation for the exploitation and humiliation of the Negro in America down through the centuries. Not all the wealth of this affluent society could meet the bill. Yet, a price can be placed on unpaid wages. The ancient common law has always provided a remedy for the appropriation of the labor of one human being by another. This law should be made to apply for American Negroes.
The payment should be in the form of a massive program by the Government of special compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law. Such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest.”
“It is my great feeling that a massive program must be developed by the federal government to bring new hope into being. Among the many vital jobs to be done, the Nation must not only radically readjust its attitude toward the Negro and the compelling present, but must incorporate in its planning some compensatory consideration for the handicaps he has inherited from the past. It is impossible to create a formula for the future which does not take into account that our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years.”
And for those who dare to think King would oppose groups like Black Lives Matter:
Here is what King said about that.
Where do we go from here? First, we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amid a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values. We must no longer be ashamed of being black. The job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy. Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget’s Thesaurus there are some 120 synonyms for blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, such words as blot, soot, grim, devil, and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity, and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is the “black sheep.”
Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child sixty ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority. The tendency to ignore the Negro’s contribution to American life and strip him of his personhood is as old as the earliest history books and as contemporary as the morning’s newspaper.
To offset this cultural homicide, the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood. Any movement for the Negro’s freedom that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery. No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation, no Johnsonian civil rights bill can totally bring this kind of freedom. The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation. And with a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of self-abnegation and say to himself and to the world, “I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor. I have a rich and noble history, however painful and exploited that history has been. Yes, I was a slave through my foreparents, and now I’m not ashamed of that. I’m ashamed of the people who were so sinful to make me a slave.” Yes, yes, we must stand up and say, “I’m black, but I’m black and beautiful.”
On April 4, 1968, a white man ended King's dream. So the last thing we blacks need to hear or read is a bunch of white people who can only misquote one sentence King spoke in his life trying to tell us what King stood for.
Mod Edit: Link to: Martin Luther King, Jr. - "Where Do We Go From Here?"
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