Happy Birthday

by

“But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.”
I Have A Dream

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. (…)

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…” We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world — a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.”
“Beyond Vietnam“

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant ‘Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God- given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six- year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you no forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”
Letter From A Birmingham Jail

7 thoughts on “Happy Birthday”

  1. Oops, I forgot one more link: the mp3 of the ‘I Have A dream’ speech.
    I do not usually cry. — One of my sister’s stuffed animals once wrote a book, which was called ‘Chimps In Agony’, and the author writes about one of the agonized chimps: “He din cry. He din mak fac.” That has always been my approach. But King’s speech is one of the few things that reliably reduces me to tears. And now, I’m off to listen to it.

  2. I posted these two quotations on the 1964 murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney murders last year on MLK day. They’re actually more timely now, as the state of Mississippi just made an arrest in the case for the first time.

    “Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney….that bothers me all the time, because as it’s come to me from FBI agents who investigated and also the fact of actual statements by the people who did it…they didn’t want Goodman. At the time that they stopped the car, they thought that I was in that car. That car belonged to me anyway, you know. It was a car assigned to me by CORE….Mickey Schwerner was over there, Chaney was involved in that, because the fact is that I signed Schwerner to the Meridian and Philadelphia, Mississippi, areas….
    It just seems that through the whole Movement…for some reason I wasn’t there at the time, and they were all by chance. All by chance. When Medgar was killed, I had his car all day. I had gone to Canton, Mississippi, came back in, met him at the church, gave him his car, and he told me that why don’t I come have a drink. I told him, “Naw, you’re a bad risk for me to go with you to have a drink.” So we laughed about that. I told him I wasn’t going with him; we just laughed. He got in his car and went home, and I got a ride with somebody else that took me home. And a little while later, there was a phone call saying Medgar Evers had just been shot. During that period of time, very seldom I ever, you know, missed a chance to have a drink, because you didn’t get it too often in Mississippi at that period of time. But I said no….
    But it just seems as if I was–I was just never there, and that weighs heavy, too, because a lot of things that happened that caused a lot of people to become physically hurt, I started. All right? And I came out of it ninety nine percent of the time without even getting a scratch….

    –Dave Dennis, the Missisippi director of CORE, My Soul is Rested, p. 276.

  3. “Wherever those white volunteers went, FBI agents followed. It was really a problem to count the number of FBI agents who were there to protect the students. It was just that gross.
    So then we said, “Well now, why don’t we invite a lot of whites”–we attempted to recruit blacks but that was unsuccessful–“to come and serve as volunteers in the state of Mississippi?” We thought it would bring federal protection. It didn’t bring federal protection early enough for Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman.
    What was the impact of the murders on the Summer Project?
    It made us face what all of us knew. I mean, we never made any claim about being able to prevent anyone from being killed, not to one volunteer. Okay?….
    And it made us just a bit more cautious in getting the names and addresses of everyone, making sure that they got on the buses that traveled from Ohio to Mississippi, and there was definite people to pick them up when they were going to be picked up and this sorta thing. We never tried to hide the fact that there had been killings. We didn’t glorify in it. That was simply the way it was.
    He ponders a question about whether there would have been an intense national reaction if all three of the Philadelphia victims had been black.
    The question answers itself. We’d had hundreds of killings. We had some sixty-three people killed around the question of the vote before ’64. Any other question on that subject? None of them were white. Lord knows how many people were run out of homes, run out of the state. In Yazoo City, at this period of time, it was unthinkable to hold a membership card in the NAACP, absolutely unthinkable. And register to vote–good God, man, you’re talkin’ death. Why don’t I just shoot myself? It’s be quicker.
    Why weren’t…
    More people killed?
    More people killed. I was trying to think of a different way to say it.
    No, no, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right. The only reason more people weren’t killed was because of the timing of the Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman killings, the involvement of the President in the search, and his denunciation of the act by having the search conducted.
    What would have happened to those of you in the project if the federal government had not pushed for solution…?
    Oh man, look….[claps his hands for emphasis]….we were an open book. The phones were tapped, people knew where we were going, knew where we bought our gas, where lived….you name it. Fortunately, we didn’t operate internally as though we had something to hide. I mean, our protection was the black community. We never doubted that and we knew it and we acted like it. I have no doubt that the twenty five people who really made decisions in that state politically at that time could have been wiped out in a day–and would have been. I mean, what’s to prevent it?
    I don’t know, you may think I’m overstating my case, because I was individually involved, but I have no doubt about it. Logically that’s the way the state deals with that kinda situation; that’s the way it woulda been dealt with. But the national attention, the inolvement of the President, the concern of the CIA. [Former CIA Director] Allen Dulles came to Missisippi….
    How did you come to leave Mississippi?
    The only reason I left Mississippi in ’68 was because of health. I was a delegate to the ’68 Democratic Convention. I went to a doctor [in Chicago] who was one of the top internists in the country….He said, “Yes, if you back to Mississippi you have about two months to live.”
    I hade high blood pressure. I had heart trouble. I was and still am overweight, and I’d had enough.
    How old were you?
    Oh, let’s see. In ’68, oh, I guess I must have been twenty nine. [A long pause] Why?”

    –SNCC field secretary Lawrence Guyot, on the decision to recruit white student volunteers from the North to register voters in the summer of 1964. (Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were New Yorkers, and both were white. Schwerner was a social worker and Goodman was a college student). My Soul is Rested, p. 286.

  7. My sincere apologies for going a bit off-topic and writing this, but I think it needed to be pointed out.
    Martin Luther King Jr was assuredly one the greatest Americans of all time.
    Regretfully, while searching for several of his speeches, I discovered that the number 4 result for a google search for martin luther king, seems to be either a white supremacist site, or hacked by one. (For example, one of the sections includes a diatribe against the roles of Jews in the civil rights movement, including a statement from David Duke, and several of the most vile slurs I’ve ever seen written against Martin Luther King Jr.
    If anyone knows whether the site has been hacked, or any way to at the very least knock it down in the rankings, please let me know.
    The website is http://www.martinlutherking.org . It is most assuredly not work-safe. I am not providing a direct link to the site, and will end this post before breaking the posting rules on profanity.
    Thank you,
    -Mike

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