The American Negro was a unique creation. In the years of slavery, he'd been bought and sold like an animal, and treated like one. The abolition of slavery did not free the Negro. He had no rights a white man was bound to respect. He was despised and what was worse, as the writer James Baldwin once explained, his past made him despise himself.
" This past of rope fire, torture and rape, death and humiliation, fear by day and by night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone, doubt that he was worthy of life since everyone around him denied it, sorrow for his women, for his kinful for his children who needed his protection and whom he could not protect. This past, this endless struggle to achieve a human identity. "
Between 1882 and 1938, the number of recorded lynchings in the United States totalled 3397. In America's deep South, for hundreds of years, the elders had taught the very young to live by the white man's rule. Theirs was the "Black World " , contained within boundaries there he was not to stray across. In the " White World ", some fought hard to keep the Negro in his place. Others were shamed of the rules but did not seek to change them.
By 1965, the segregation was breaking down. But in the South, the Blacks were still being denied their constitutional right to vote. Intimidation, local laws and so called " literacy tests " had kept all but a tiny proportion of blacks off the electoral rows.
Selma blacks decided to force the issue by marching on the State capital Montgomery. The march was promptly banned by Alabama's Governor George Wallace. On March f, 600 local blacks set off for Montgomery, crossing the Alabama River, the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Wallace had sent a hundred State troopers to stop them. Millions of Americans watched the march on television. Among them the movement's leader Martin Luther King who'd been preaching in Atlanta. King hurried to Selma.
" A man dies when he refuses to pick a stand for that which is true."
" We gonna stand up amid tear gas letting the world know that we are determined to be free. "
Johnson now directed Attorney General Catsenberg to finish drafting the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and he asked Goodwin to write the speech with which he did introduce it to a joint session of Congress.
" I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. The constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his colour. We have all sworn an oath before God to support and to defend that constitution. We must now act in obedience to that oath .Their cause must be our cause too because it's not just Negroes but really it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome. "
In 1966, King took his campaign to Chicago where local black leaders were challenging the systematic exclusion of blacks from white neighbourhoods. There was a frenzic reaction from Chicago's ethnic working class whites. " GO BACK TO AFRICA " they shouted at King. I thought that without the protection of the Chicago police, King might have been lynched. As stones were thrown, he knelt in the street.
" I don't mind saying to Chicago I'm tired of marching, tired of marching for something that should have been mine at birth.
" l don't mind saying to you tonight that I'm tired of living everyday under the threat of death. I have no mortal complex. I wanna live as long as anybody in this building tonight and sometimes I begin to doubt whether I'm gonna make it through. I must confess I'm tired. "
" We need each other. The Negro needs the White man to free him from his fears. And the White man needs the Negro to free him from his guilt. "
King struggled on for another two years. The end came as he expected it might. With his murder in 1968, King died a disappointed man. America had granted Black Americans their constitutional rights. But this was virtually all. He wanted more. In the last months of his life, he tried to persuade White America to make up for all those decades of deliberate deprivation by embarking on a deliberate redistribution of its wealth. That was to have been King next campaign: A MARCH ON WASHINGTON BY THE POOR !
ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
Sincerelyours
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