Man With A Plan
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- May 21, 2023
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Nowhere in that speech did King declare that blacks needed a hand out to overcome adversity...in fact he declared that "no Johnsonian civil rights bill can totally bring this kind of freedom"! I think Reverend King would be ashamed of the way you beg for reparations, IM2. How you blame "white racism" for the shortcomings of blacks! I think he'd look at thug culture and race hustlers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and cringe at all of it.Martin Luther King hoped for the end of white racism. That's what he was taking about when he said the only sentence you remember him saying. King woud not be embarrassed by anything I have done.
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.” This, this self-affirmation is the black man’s need, made compelling by the white man’s crimes against him.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here,” Annual Report Delivered in August of 1967 at the 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta Georgia. Where Do We Go From Here? | Austin MLK Celebration
Learn that King spoke more than one sentence and that the sentence he spoke doesn't mean what you want to make it mean.