For decades to come, the writings and speeches of Dr. King will continue to be taught in our schools. His writings will be the subject of graduate school theses and books written and published by academia. Once a year, the portal of the television will recall his most stirring speeches. Every child will know excerpts from his, “I Have a Dream,” speech or the chillingly prescient, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” given just one day before his assassination.
But what is his legacy in your life? What is it in our common life as a nation? As a world? The truth is that if we don’t take a closer look from time to time or take a few minutes to listen to a recording of one of his speeches; if we never read a book written by Dr. King or a biography based on personal accounts of people that knew him, the legacy is not a living one. We need to examine the struggle for human and civil rights for not only African-Americans but for all of the oppressed peoples of the world and indeed all of the various groups of peoples that suffer from discrimination and lack of opportunity. It behooves us a nation to recall the words of this man that some have considered a prophet sent to enlighten us all. His most sublime thoughts at times echo in our minds like poetry. His message of love and acceptance can be an excellent lesson and teaching tool for our youngest children. But Dr. King was not an author of children’s books. He was involved in a life and death fight that he understood would one day cut his own life tragically short.
Those of us who are older and know of the life of this leader understand that the struggle which motivated his actions and tireless devotion was in reality that of a succession of countless personal trials endured by millions of African-Americans over a period of centuries. These are ugly stories of persecution, intolerance and violence. And unifying these truths at the very center of our history is the picture of slavery. We must never forget or allow ourselves distance from this. That’s why I have chosen to excerpt a speech that Dr. King gave in New York City, September 12, 1962 on the one hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Let us delve boldly into the universal truths that he spoke of so long ago.
Dr. King was a son of the South and held an abiding love for the people of his land. But in this speech he takes aim at the South in a way that by today’s standards might seem to cruelly single out the South as the source of racial segregation. Of course, Dr. King was always keenly aware of racial attitudes of complacent republicans and others in North and across the nation just as much as he was involved with the racial politics of the Southern democrats. Allow me to preface this article with a quote from my dear, departed friend, Sheria Reid, of South Carolina that very eloquently gives us Yankees, New Englanders, Westerners and Heartlanders a clearer understanding of race relations in the South. This is a picture that goes back to the beginnings of our shared history. There is a certain intimacy between the races in the South that we don’t see in the rest of the nation. From her blog post, “Race, Gingrich and South Carolina,” published in, “The Examined Life,” January 22, 2012. Interestingly, nearly three years after her untimely death, her blog continues to receive visitors from around the world.
http://theexaminedlife-sheria.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2012-03-11T01:45:00-05:00&max-results=10&start=40&by-date=false (Scroll down to third post to read.)
I love living in the south--the mild winters, the summer heat, magnolia trees with those impossibly large white blooms nestled among glossy green leaves. I like iced tea, collard greens, and watermelon. I can make a sweet potato pie that will make you forget that there is such a thing as a pumpkin. I'm southern to the core and while I love my southern heritage, I also know that it includes a dark side, a little problem that has to do with race.
Please don't misunderstand. I know that race is not an issue only in the South. I've seen enough manifestations of racial prejudice in my lifetime to be certain that it is not limited by geography. The South just has a peculiar love/hate affair with its perceptions about race. The white guy with a confederate flag on his bumper and who would disown any child of his that dated outside of his race will stop to help a lone black woman standing by the road next to her broken down car.
Now let us take a closer look at Dr. King’s speech.
Mankind through the ages has been engaged in a ceaseless struggle to give dignity and meaning to human life. If, in its effort to achieve this goal, our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we honor on its one-hundredth anniversary, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power, and how malignant their evil.
The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to a world organized politically and spiritually around the concept of the inequality of man that liberty was inherent in man as a living being; that he could not create a lasting society if it alienated freedom from man. The Emancipation Proclamation was the offspring of the Declaration of Independence. It used the force of law to uproot a social order which sought to separate liberty from a segment of humanity.
Our pride and our progress could be unqualified if the story ended here. But history reveals that these documents were each to live lives of stormy contradictions to be both observed and violated through social upheavals and spiritual disasters.
If we look at our history with honesty and clarity, we will be forced to admit that our Federal form of government has been, from the day of its birth, weakened in its integrity, confused and confounded in its direction, by the unresolved race question. It is as if a political drug taken during pregnancy caused the birth of a crippled nation. We seldom accord adequate significance to the fact that Thomas Jefferson's text of the Declaration of Independence was revised by the Continental Congress to eliminate an attack on the slave trade.
It was expunged lest it offend the Southern Representatives, just as even now racial legislation is emasculated or discarded lest it, too, give offense to the South. Jefferson knew that such compromises with principle struck at the heart of the nation's security and integrity. In 182O, six years before his death, he wrote these melancholy words:
"But this momentous question [slavery], like a the bell in the night awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776 to acquire self-government and happiness to their country is to be thrown away, and my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it."
One region of our nation has waged a ceaseless rebellion against the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Supreme Court. In the Revolutionary War powerful slave interests in the South fought with the British. The development of the nation to the West was complicated and hindered by the slave power. The rebellion against equality continued into the second half of the Nineteenth Century and on into the Twentieth Century, diminishing and corroding the authority of the Federal government. It has contaminated every institution in our society in every year of our existence. Even today a single region of our country holds a veto power over the majority of the nation, nullifying basic constitutional rights, and, in the exercise of its illegal conduct, retards our growth. The South, in walling itself off from the application of laws and judicial decrees behind an iron curtain of defiance, has tried to be a law unto itself. It is an autonomous region whose attitude toward the central government is in some aspects as defiant as a hostile nation. This is the source of the scorn expressed by African and Asian states when we lecture them on government while our own suffers from a glaring defect of sovereignty.
Dr. King states his thesis with brutal clarity. The thoughts of Jefferson in his final years may have been mingled with ideas from his close personal friend, John Adams. MLK uses the quote to illustrate a fatal flaw that was built into the U.S. Constitution. That flaw has been remedied. Would we have the same strength today to come together as a nation if such a need arose?
Today the scourge of racism is not centered in the South as it once might have been described when George Wallace was the Governor of Alabama. The Civil Rights movement was born in the South. The marches took place in Alabama. The churches were bombed or burned in the South. It was in Birmingham Alabama in 1961 that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Bull Connor, allowed the KKK to attack the Freedom Riders free from any police protection or interference until the Klansmen had mostly left and gone home. In 1963 he infamously ordered the protestors shot with water cannons from the high-pressure fire hydrants while he simultaneously trained police dogs on the crowd.
Today the fires of racism are fanned by inflammatory hate speech largely propagated across the internets. The dual-edged sword of ignorance and denial, coupled with calls to violence and political action, dulls the minds of its consumers. Let us continue with the words of Dr. King.
The unresolved race question is a pathological infection in our social and political anatomy, which has sickened us throughout our history. How has our social health been injured by this condition? The legacy is the impairment of the lives of nearly 20,000,000 of our citizens. Based solely on their color, Negroes have been condemned to a sub-existence, never sharing the fruits of progress equally. The average income of Negroes is approximately $3,900 per family annually compared to $5,800 for white citizens. This differential, tragic though it is, tells only part of the story. The more terrible aspect is found in the inner structure and quality of the Negro community. It is a community artificially but effectively separated from the dominant culture of our society. It has a pathetically small and grotesquely distorted middle class. The overwhelming majority of Negroes are domestics, laborers, and always the largest segment of the unemployed. If employment entails heavy work, if the wages are miserable, if the filth is revolting, the job belongs to the Negro.
Every Negro knows these truths, and his personality is corroded by a sense of inferiority, generated by this degraded status. Negroes, North and South, still live in segregation, housed in unendurable slums, eat in segregation, pray in segregation, and die in segregation. The life experience of the Negro in integration remains a rare exception even in the North.
This is the essential texture of freedom and equality for the Negro one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and one hundred and eighty-six years after the Declaration of Independence. This somber picture may introduce the sober thought that there is nothing to commemorate on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. However, tragic disappointments and undeserved defeats do not put an end to life, nor do they wipe out the positive aspects, however submerged beneath floods of negative experience.
The Emancipation Proclamation yielded four enduring results. First, it gave force to the executive power to change conditions in the national interest on a broad and far-reaching scale. Second, it dealt a devastating blow to a system of slave-holding and an economy based upon it which had been muscular enough to engage in warfare on the Federal government. It forced a change which limited the area of maneuver in which enemies of the Constitution might deploy. Third, it enabled the Negro to play a significant role in his own liberation through his new ability to organize and to struggle, with less of the bestial retaliation his slave status had permitted to his masters. Fourth, it resurrected and restated the principle of equality upon which the founding of the nation rested.
Our truly great Presidents were tortured deep in their hearts by the race question. Jefferson saw with keen perception that the immorality of slavery degraded the white master as well as the Negro. He expressed fears for the future of white children who are taught a false supremacy. His concern can be summed up in one quotation, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
We can take some comfort in these words. Those of us who were living in the 1960s and possessed at the minimum a child’s perception of the social divides and conditions of the era can readily contrast lives of African-Americans in the mid-century with what we see today. We can also bring to mind many success stories of black professionals, artisans, professors and teachers, soldiers, civil servants and sworn officers of the law that attest to the progress that we have made as a nation. Families live in peace and safety free from the chains that once fettered their livelihood and well-being. Real estate covenants have been broken.
When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation it was not the act of an opportunistic politician issuing a hollow pronouncement to placate a pressure group. Lincoln's torments are well known; his vacillations were facts. In the seething cauldron of 1862 and 1863, Lincoln was called the "Baboon President" in the North, and coward, assassin, savage, murderer of women and babies, and "Lincoln the Fiend" in the South, yet he searched his way to the conclusions embodied in the words, "in giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free, honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve." On this moral foundation he prepared the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, and to emphasize the decisiveness of his course he called his cabinet together and declared he was not seeking their advice as to its wisdom but only suggestions on subject matter.
Lincoln achieved immortality because he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. His hesitation had not stayed his hand when historic necessity charted but one course. No President can be great, or measure up to his responsibilities, if he attempts to accommodate to injustice to maintain his political balance.
The Emancipation Proclamation shattered the slave system, undermining the foundations of the economy of the rebellious South, and guaranteed that no slave holding class could prepare a new and deadlier war after resuscitation. The Proclamation opened the door to self-liberation for the Negro; he immediately acted by deserting the plantations in the South and joining the Union armies in the North. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, seeing a regiment of Negroes march through Beacon Street in Boston, wrote in his diary, "An imposing sight, with something wild and strange about it, like a dream. At last the North consents to let the Negro fight for freedom."
The world significance of the Emancipation Proclamation was colorfully described by another great American, Frederick Douglass, in these words: "It recognizes and declares the real nature of the contest and places the North on the side of justice and civilization ... Unquestionably the first of January, 1963, is to be the most memorable day in American annals. The Fourth of July was great, but the First of January, when we consider it in all its relations and bearings, is incomparably greater. The one had respect to the mere political birth of a nation; the last concerns the national life and character and is to determine whether that life and character shall be radiantly glorious with all high and noble virtues, or infamously blackened forevermore."
This article, a written account of the speech, appeared in print in the magazine, “The Progressive,” the December 1962 edition. I gather that it was transcribed by MLK himself. He had type-written the original manuscript which is archived with penned notes and corrections to this day. I enjoy his writing as an historian.
There is but one way to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation. That is to make its declaration of freedom real; to reach back to the origins of our nation when our message of equality electrified an unfree world, and reaffirm democracy by deeds as bold and daring as the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation.
We do not have as much time as the cautious try to give us. We are not only living in a time of cataclysmic change--we live in an era in which human rights is the central world issue. A totally new political phenomenom has arisen from the rubble and destruction of World War II. A neutralist sector has established itself between the two contending camps of the world. More than a billion people are in the neutralist arena. One basic reason for the neutrality of these nations is that they do not trust the integrity of either East or West on the issue of equality and human rights. Our declarations that we are making progress in race relations ring in their ears with pathetic emptiness. In India, Indonesia, Ghana, and Brazil, to mention a few nations which together contain almost a billion humans, the right to vote has been exercised even by illiterate peasants in primitive villages still ringed by jungle. In some of our cities in the South, college professors cannot vote, cannot eat, and cannot use a library or a park in equality. In Africa, Negroes have formed states, govern themselves, and function in world tribunals with dignity and effectiveness.
From where I stand, the republican party of the U.S.A. today is again seeking to suppress if not specifically the negro vote, certainly as many black and brown votes as possible. Fortunately this community has safeguards which protect their own from these discriminatory practices. They have been largely ineffective in the latest election.
The simple fact is that the relative progress in undeveloped sectors of the world in human rights races at jet speed, while we strain in a horse and buggy for advancement. We are not moving in the world tempo of change. Worse still, as the earth is shrunk by the revolution in communication, and the shams of Little Rock, Albany, and Oxford flash around the globe, the world is becoming more aware of our deficiencies. Floods of consumer goods, superhighways, supermarkets, and tel-stars do not obscure the existence of scabrous prejudice; and this fact more than any other explains why more emerging nations move away from us than toward us. The touchstone is not the sophistication of our industrial devices, but our commitment to freedom and equality. Without faith that we are wedded to these truths, our power and strength become a menace to other peoples, and they will maintain their distance until we have justified their confidence.
If you, dear reader, had any doubts as to whether Dr. King’s words still held relevance in our society today, the previous excerpt should allay any fears.
The centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation is a particular reminder that the forceful, extensive use of executive power is deeply rooted in our tradition. Lincoln used his executive authority to forge the main link of a social revolution. Never before and never since has a President so changed the economy, so renewed the fundamental rights of humans, or expropriated such billions in private property with an executive order. Lincoln's immense exercise of power should have made it easier for the Presidents who followed him to do the lesser deeds which are needed to realize complete emancipation. Yet it is a tragic fact that in the succeeding hundred years no President has possessed the daring or the will to make his office a truly effective instrument for change.
Unfortunately Dr. King did not anticipate a president who built his legacy upon the undoing of that of his predecessor.
There is an effective, simple approach. It rejects high-wire acrobatics. The first President to use it will be the first President since Lincoln to use executive authority for civil rights as power, not as a probe. When a contemporary President declares that segregation and inequality are morally and legally indefensible and that enough time has expired for all who will to adjust, and that all the massive resources of the Federal government will enforce every constitutional right of Negroes, he will split the reluctant and resisting South in two. More than half will accept the new conditions almost willingly when they confront a resolute and determined government. The others will split further into those who will accept and comply, though unhappily. A small minority, isolated in criminality, will seek to resist. Their opposition will crumble before an implacable government, and desegregation across the South could be achieved in less than a year.
A reel-to-reel tape of the audio of this historic tape was found a couple of years ago. Go here for the transcription in the December 1962 edition of, “Progressive,” magazine which I used for this article.
Go here for a video of Dr. Martin Luther King’s original type-written copy of this speech skillfully synchronized with the audio recording.
And to all of you who have read this far, let me extend to you my personal thanks. You read the entire transcription of this historic speech, or at least as much as appeared in the magazine in 1962. May the Goddess bless each and every one of you contributors here at the Writer Beat. Please find it in your hearts to honor Dr. King today. Even if some of you disagree with me on smaller points of our shared and contemporary history, I commend you all. Your hearts are in the right places. Normally I like to tell my fellow blogonauts that we are all Americans. So on the venerable Writer Beat I remind each and every one of you that we are all citizens of the world. Let us put aside our differences and seek in earnest that which unites us and put aside that which pushes us apart.
Happy Martin Luther King Day everyone! As EXPAT reminded me, we are a global community.
Yes, thank the Goddess, as a nation we have made a world of difference in race relations in this country. This blessing is in no small part directly attributable to the life and sacrifice lived by Dr. King. I think that this progress has been reflected in the greater part of the civilized world as well. Most likely the U.S. is probably one of the last bastions of institutionalized and personalized racism in the world today. In my view it is counter-productive to say that equality has been achieved and that discrimination and racism no longer exist. Y’all ain’t really paying attention, are you? I do have the opportunity to read some of the true racist commentary that still exists out there on the web. Actually, my bloggy opponents are probably the least of the offenders. They still care enough to engage. But you, the color-blind of the WB…
I hold great hope for you in my heart.
If you read Sheria’s post from 2012, you noticed that she mentioned South Carolina sweet potato pie. In friendship and fun, I challenged her to match my recipe for pumpkin pie from Tulsa Oklahoma. She provided me with her recipe for South Carolina style sweet potato pie. I made two pies. I took one pie to share with the nurses at the fabulous White Sands of La Jolla. I didn’t use Eagle brand condensed milk, just Carnation. Two nurses absolutely loved it. The young, skinny nurse came up with a lower calorie version. The fat charge nurse suggested adding red hots to the mixture.
Martin Luther King, Jr., A Profile, edited by C. Eric Lincoln.
Wonderful first-hand accounts of the movement.
A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches by Martin Luther King Jr.,
James Washington Editor.