Speech challenging the American character, 1984

Copyright by Julian Bond April, 1985

^{Fortuitous confluence of this occasion of the 1st celebration of ML King Ho'day.....neighbors teachers colleagues constituents}

[Illegible]

Although Americans have always had a preoccupation with race, it is only in the recent past that the nation began to take aggressive steps to ^{at the insistance of the victims to} inhibit and diminish the white supremacist impulse in the American character.

Forty years ago, the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal released his classic American Dillemma, issuing a challenge to Americans to match their promises with their practices.

Thirty one [illegible] 3 years ago the United States Supreme Court declared that segregation in the public schools was illegal in Brown vs the Board of Education, Topeka.

In the words of Richard Klugar, "Not until the Supreme Court acted in 1954 did the nation acknowledge that it had been blaming the Black man for what it had done to him. His sentence to second class citizenship had been commuted; the quest for meaningful equality - eqality in fact as well as law - had begun."*

If the depression in 1929 had convinced America it has obliged to protect its citizens' well being, the decisions in 1954 and "55 began to convince reluctant Americans they would have to share their bounty, their knowledge and their world. For the American Negro, as Kluger notes:

"No more would be a grinning supplicant for the benefactions and discards of the master class; no more would he be a party to his own degredation. He was both thrilled that the signal for the demise of his class status had come from on high and angry that it had taken so long and first extracted so steep a price in suffering."** -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Simple Justice, by Richard Kluger, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1976, pp 748. ** Kluger, pp 749.

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[illegible ^{A year} after Brown, a middle-aged department store seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on a city bus so a white man could sit down. Five years after Montgomery four black young men, college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, refused to give up their seats at a dime store lunch counter reserved for whites.

These small acts of passive resistance to American apartheid - and the acts of tens of thousands more - created a people's movement that eliminated legal segregation in less than a decade.

Those white Americans who declare today that yesterday's movement went too far have either forgotten or never know ^what yesterdar^y - for blacks - was really like. Let the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put you back in that place, not quite a generation ago. To white clergymen in Birmingham who could not understand why he was an inmate in their jail, he wrote:

"When you have seen vivious 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 a 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 distory her personality by

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developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year old son who is asking: "Daddy, whey do white people treat colored people so mean?.....when you are humilated day in and day out be nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored'; when your first 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 on tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness' - then you will understand....'**

But w^We are here to take stock ^understand to add up the accounts, to measure distances traveled as well as distances yet to come. _________________________________________________________________________

Without appearing over-optimistic, the job done so har has been remarkable no matter how great the task that remains undone. Who would have believed that a people's opinions and their public behavoir could be changed so quickly.

The [illegible] ^reign of white people priviledge began to end, Jack O'Dell has written, when there was created a "dual authority" in this country.

[Illegible]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ***Why We Can't Wait, Martin Luther King, Jr. , New York, Harper & Row, 1964.

Seven lines marked through

He wrote: "There was on one hand the established authority: the citadels of institutionalized racism, the masters of war, the apparatus of government - state, local and federal - and those chosen to do the dirty work of suppressing our movement in defense of the status quo. This established authority acted out a way of life that was rooted in custom and tradition, and dictated by class interests."

The other center of authority was the Civil Rights-Anti War Movement which represented a continuum of protest during the period. This authority, the Movement, represented the people's alternative to the power of institutionalized racism and colonial war."

That movement bears major responsibility for creating the ^{benefits and changes} [illegible] ^{we all me women, black, white, enjoy} today. O'Dell writes again: "It is equally important to recognize that the civil rights laws of the 1950s were passed after the fact. They did not create change; rather, the struggle for expanded democracy, participated in by tens of thousands of our fellow citizens, produced a body of legislation which confirmed the effectiveness of that struggle. The laws were a crystalized form of expressing the new reality that people would no longer abide by the rules are mores of racial segregation"

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Mrs. Rosa Parks protest also helped create a new leader, a minister named Martin Luther King. He accepted the stewardship of Montgomery's Movement against segregated bus seating, and his eloquent voice propelled him into the leadership of a growing national movement, a position he held until his assasination in 1968.

The modern civil rights movement,[illegible] ^was constructed on a series of actions and events stretching back into the beginning of African slavery on American soil; from then until now, from Gabriel Prosser ^{and Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey} through Martin Luther King and our times today, there has been a certain continuity in this struggle.

Think if you will ^{for a passing moment} of the magnitude and cruelty of American slavery. 60 million live souls sailed from West Africa in chains - only 15 million survived the Holocaust of the Middle Passage. Once here, the African quickly revolted against being another man's property - Hispanola in 1522; Cuba in 1533; Mexico in 1537 - a steady, bloody stream of revolt.

Overcoming that awful heritage and remembering those revolts ought to be part of today's [illegible] ^{rememberances} as well.

Martin Luther King would have been56 58 ⁵⁹ years old had he been able to celebrate his birthday in 1985, 1984 ¹⁹⁸⁸

Had he lived until today, there's no doubt our world would be different than it is.

Because he did live, when he did, we live in a world a little better than we might have, a world a little less filled with fear and hate.