Speech challenging the American character, 1984

refused to stand up on a Montgomery city bus so a white man could sit down.

Until that day in 1957, most black Americans were no more than eager by-standers at the side of the stage upon which was acted their liberation.

The actors were those few black lawyers who could lititgate the race problem, or black social scientists who could codify and chart and graph the dimensions of racial superiority.

The average many or woman who ^was [illegible] black found their participation limited to voting - where blacks were permitted to vote - or to making a meager contribution in cash or kind to the works of that small band of civil rights professionals.

But when Rosa Parks refused to stand up, and when Martin King stood up to preach, mass participation came to the movement for civil rights.

That kind of mass participation is badly needed in today's movement as well.

The lesson of the Montgomery bus boycott and the civil rights movement of the 60s is that we move forward fastest when we move forward together.

Our struggle cannot be fought by leadship figures alone.

Instead, there is a task ahead for each of us, both singly and in unison.

That task is the completion of the dream you founders saw 75 years ago, the realization

Your Senator Jon Johnson is correct - the battle for expanded education for Black youth in Louisiana belongs as much to the people in the audience as it does to those at the head table; as much to the citizens as it does to the leadership; as much to the voter as it does to those few whom they vote.

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^Fortunately there is a large number of Americans whose vision of their future does not match the view from the oval officer.

Their is a sizeable body of opinion in America which refuses to surrender yesterday's goals to the occupants of power and the princes of privilege.

But these -- our countrymen and women, young and old, of all races, creeds, and colors -- mistakenly believe themselves to be impotent, unable to influence the society in which they live.

²⁵ twenty years ago, black young people in the south sat down in order to stand up for their rights.

They marched and picketed and protested against state-sanctioned segregation, and brought that system crashing to its knees

In later years, another generation said "no" to aggressive, colonial war waged by their country, and put their bodies in the path of the war machine.

Today's times require no less, and, in fact, insist on more.

There is a large space created by the lack of effective poltiical opposition to the selfishness that surrounds us -- that space can be filled and the forceful opposition mobilized, but it will take hard work.

New voters must be registered and organized and educated and energized.

This year's Congressional contests should become 435 referenda on reaganomics, surveys on the contiunuation of an aggressive, foreign policy.

Here will come a first national opporunity to purge the congress of the moral majoritorians.

Yesterday's movement produced today's successes, in commerce, in politics.

If our [illegible] progress from the back of the bus to the [illegible] ^middle rungs of the corporate ladder remains incomplete, and if nearly a third of us have been left standing in the unemployment line or waiting in welfare offices, let us take heart. If there is much to be done, we have much more to do it with, much more than those pioneers who bought us this far.

We have more than a century's worth of agressive self help & voluntarism, in church and civic club and neighborhood association, providing scholarships, helping the needy, and financing the cause of social injustice.

Without Black charity, I wouldn't have a college education, Thurgood Marshall wouldn't have a law degree, and many - far, far too many of us wouldn't wear