is much like the "dream" that Rev. King described in
the brown text of this great sermon.
He would likely be the last to object to extending his vision to
other downtrodden people of other nations of the world. )
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or perish together as fools.�
delivered on August 28, 1963
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the
Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of
Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to
end the long night of captivity.
"Jesus [is] the world's most famous liberal."
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent
"If physical death is the price I must pay
"St. Augustine, Florida " June 5, 1964 Click here to hear MLK's own voice. See this excellent article by Earl Ofari Hutchinson on How Conservative was Dr. King Some Republicans peddlers of deceit, including the National Black Republican Association, have claimed that Dr. King was a Republican. A Martin Luther King Jr. biographer and a senior researcher with the Atlanta-based King Center told the Associated Press that the Reverend was non-partisan and that he never endorsed any politician from either of the parties. "I think it's highly inaccurate to say he was a Republican because there's really no evidence," King Center researcher Steve Klein told the Associated Press. LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING "The Black National Anthem" By James Weldon Johnson Lift ev'ry voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring. Ring with the harmonies of Liberty; Let our rejoicing rise, High as the list'ning skies, Let it resound loud as the rolling sea. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us, Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us; Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won. Stony the road we trod, Bitter the chast'ning rod, Felt in the days when hope unborn had died; Yet with a steady beat, Have not our weary feet, Come to the place for which our fathers sighed? We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, Out from the gloomy past, Till now we stand at last Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast. God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on the way; Thou who has by Thy might, Led us into the light, Keep us forever in the path, we pray. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee, Shadowed beneath thy hand, May we forever stand, True to our God, True to our native land.
Check out Roger Davis and Wanda Neal-Davis' great |
The "Christianity" of the "Bible Belt" of the United States of America:
Frederick Douglass was an extraordinary man, who not only managed to throw off the shackles of slavery but went far beyond the conventional wisdom of his enslavers. In his autobiography, he contrasted the Christianity that prevailed in the southern part of America at least in his day, and the Christianity of Christ : "If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
Rebel Redemption Redux http://www.dissentmagazine.org/archive/wi01/zeitz.html In the winter of his life, the ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass took up arms in fierce rhetorical battle for the collective memory of the Civil War. "Death has no power to change moral qualities," he admonished a crowd assembled in 1894 at Rochester's Mt. Hope Cemetery, where, nine months later, he would himself be laid to rest. "What was bad before the war, and during the war, has not been made good since the war. . . . Whatever else I may forget, I shall never forget the difference between those who fought for liberty and those who fought for slavery." It was a theme he had been sounding for almost thirty years - that national amnesia must not obscure the crimes of the Confederacy, that the spirit of inter-sectional reunion must not blot out the moral dimension of the Civil War, that "there was a right side and a wrong side in the late war which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget." Douglass was outraged by the willingness of the victorious to forgive and forget the trespasses of the vanquished. In the years following the Civil War, Northerners seemed completely acquiescent in the face of a vigorous cultural and historical assault against common-sense memory. They permitted Southerners to divest the bloody conflict of its ideological and moral components and to refashion the war as an epic family feud in which Johnny Reb and Billy Yank each fought courageously and honorably, buried the hatchet, and became brothers again. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. " Edmund Burke Even in this, the 21st century, Southerners are still trying to persuade themselves that their ancestor's enslavement of black people wasn't all that bad. A recent publication "The Good Old Days of Slavery" , claims that "Many Southern blacks supported the South because of long established bonds of affection and trust that had been forged over generations with their white masters and friends." and "There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world." People today who imagine that white Christians like themselves couldn't possibly have approved of the enslavement of millions of black people, don't realize that slavery was so embedded in the culture of the South that the Christian churches practically made it a sacrament! But don't take my word for this. Listen to them!
The web site below shows why many white Southerners still embrace the Conservative, white supremacist "faith of their (slaveholding) fathers". What is much harder to understand, however, is why so many African American Christians have been unable to escape from that same Christian Conservative faith, which their ancestors brought with them from the Old South (with the exception, of course, of the part that supported, and still supports slavery, segregation and discrimination.) The extent of the moral decadence of Dixie has been illustrated in any number of ways, by the multitude lynchings, the way juries "of their peers" acquitted men who were guilty of the most heinous crimes, the ferocity of common people who opposed the desegregation of public schools in the South, and the kind of people the South has sent to "represent" them in Congress, whether they were called "Southern Democrats", "Dixiecrats", or "Southern Republicans".
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What I have said respecting and
against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the
slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible
reference to Christianity proper; for, between the
Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I
recognize the widest, possible difference-so wide, that
to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity
to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the
friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the
other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity
of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding,
women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical
Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but
the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land
Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers,
the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.
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The Nemesis of American Bigotry : The Southern Poverty Law Center If you want to determine which of the organizations battling racial bigotry and/or white supremacy is, ask either the victims or the villains, and you'll likely get the same answer:
In 1983, in an attempt to detroy evidence gathered by the Center investigators for a major lawsuit against a Klan group, three Klansmen firebombed the Center's first headquarters (in Birmingham, Alabama). Before the blaze, one arsonist tried to recruit a follower to assassinate Morris Dees. See much more about this great organization at www.SPLCenter.Org. |
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The Real ROSA PARKS by Paul LoebAuthor of Book & website : Soul of a Citizen We learn much from how we present our heroes. A few years ago, on Martin Luther King Day, I was interviewed on CNN. So was Rosa Parks, by phone from Los Angeles. "We're very honored to have her," said the host. "Rosa Parks was the woman who wouldn't go to the back of the bus. She wouldn't get up and give her seat in the white section to a white person. That set in motion the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery. It earned Rosa Parks the title of 'mother of the Civil Rights movement.'" I was excited to hear Parks' voice and to be part of the same show. Then it occurred to me that the host's description - the story's standard rendition - stripped the Montgomery boycott of all its context. Before refusing to give up her bus seat, Parks had spent twelve years helping lead the local NAACP chapter, along with union activist E.D. Nixon, from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, teachers from the local Negro college, and a variety of ordinary members of Montgomery's African American community. The summer before, Parks had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee's labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she'd met an older generation of civil rights activists and discussed the recent Supreme Court decision banning "separate-but-equal" schools. During this period of involvement and education, Parks had become familiar with previous challenges to segregation: Another Montgomery bus boycott, fifty years earlier, successfully eased some restrictions; a bus boycott in Baton Rouge won limited gains two years before Parks was arrested; and the previous spring, a young Montgomery woman had also refused to move to the back of the bus, causing the NAACP to consider a legal challenge until it turned out that she was unmarried and pregnant, and therefore a poor symbol for a campaign. In short, Parks didn't make a spur-of-the-moment decision. Rosa Parks didn't single-handedly give birth to the civil rights efforts, but she was part of an existing movement for change, at a time when success was far from certain. This in no way diminishes the power and historical importance of her refusal to give up her seat. But it does remind us that this tremendously consequential act might never have taken place without all the humble and frustrating work that she and others did earlier on. And that her initial step of getting involved was just as courageous and critical as her choice on the bus that all of us have heard about. People like Parks shape our models of social commitment. Yet the conventional retelling of her story creates a standard so impossible to meet, it may actually make it harder for us to get involved. This portrayal suggests that social activists come out of nowhere, to suddenly take dramatic stands. It implies that we act with the greatest impact when we act alone, or at least when we act alone initially. It reinforces a notion that anyone who takes a committed public stand, or at least an effective one, has to be a larger-than-life figure - someone with more time, energy, courage, vision, or knowledge than any normal person could ever possess. This belief pervades our society, in part because the media tends not to represent historical change as the work of ordinary human beings, which it almost always is. Once we enshrine our heroes on pedestals, it becomes hard for mere mortals to measure up in our eyes. However individuals speak out, we're tempted to dismiss their motives, knowledge, and tactics as insufficiently grand or heroic. We fault them for not being in command of every fact and figure, or being able to answer every question put to them. We fault ourselves as well, for not knowing every detail, or for harboring uncertainties and doubts. We find it hard to imagine that ordinary human beings with ordinary flaws might make a critical difference in worthy social causes. Yet those who act have their own imperfections, and ample reasons to hold back. "I think it does us all a disservice," says a young African-American activist in Atlanta named Sonya Tinsley, "when people who work for social change are presented as saints--so much more noble than the rest of us. We get a false sense that from the moment they were born they were called to act, never had doubts, were bathed in a circle of light. But I'm much more inspired learning how people succeeded despite their failings and uncertainties. It's a much less intimidating image. It makes me feel like I have a shot at changing things too." Sonya had recently attended a talk given by one of Martin Luther King's Morehouse professors, in which he mentioned how much King had struggled when he first came to college, getting only a 'C', for example, in his first philosophy course. "I found that very inspiring, when I heard it," Sonya said, "given all that King achieved. It made me feel that just about anything was possible." Our culture's misreading of the Rosa Parks story speaks to a more general collective amnesia, where we forget the examples that might most inspire our courage and conscience. Apart from obvious times of military conflict, most of us know next to nothing of the many battles ordinary men and women fought to preserve freedom, expand the sphere of democracy, and create a more just society. Of the abolitionist and civil rights movements, we at best recall a few key leaders - and often misread their actual stories. We know even less about the turn-of-the-century populists who challenged entrenched economic interests and fought for a "cooperative commonwealth." Who these days can describe the union movements that ended 80-hour work weeks at near-starvation wages? Who knows the origin of the social security system? How did the women's suffrage movement spread to hundreds of communities, and gather enough strength to prevail? As memories of these events disappear, we lose the knowledge of mechanisms that grassroots social movements have used successfully in the past to shift public sentiment and challenge entrenched institutional power. Equally lost are the means by which their participants managed to keep on and eventually prevail in circumstances at least as harsh as those we face today. As novelist Milan Kundera writes, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Think again about the different ways one can frame Rosa Parks' historic action. In the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in isolation. She's a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to be that if any of us suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic, that would be great. Of course most of us don't, so we wait our entire lives to find the ideal moment. Parks' real story conveys a far more empowering moral. She begins with seemingly modest steps. She goes to a meeting, and then another. Hesitant at first, she gains confidence as she speaks out. She keeps on despite a profoundly uncertain context, as she and others act as best they can to challenge deeply intrenched injustices, with little certainty of results. Had she and others given up after her tenth or eleventh year of commitment, we might never have heard of Montgomery. Parks' journey suggests that change is the product of deliberate, incremental action, whereby we join together to try to shape a better world. Sometimes our struggles will fail, as did many earlier efforts of Parks, her peers, and her predecessors. Other times they may bear modest fruits. And at times they will trigger a miraculous outpouring of courage and heart - as happened with her arrest and all that followed. For only when we act despite all our uncertainties and doubts do we have the chance to shape history. Paul Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time (St Martin's, 1999, $15.95, www.soulofacitizen.org), and of Generation at the Crossroads, Nuclear Culture, and Hope in Hard Times. |
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The "Christianity" of the "Bible Belt" of the United States of America: Frederick Douglass was an extraordinary man, who not only managed to throw off the shackles of slavery but went far beyond the conventional wisdom of his enslavers. In his autobiography, he contrasted the Christianity that prevailed in the southern part of America at least in his day, and the Christianity of Christ : " I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative that I have, in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief explanation.
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So boycott, already! The wonderful comic, Sam Levinson, had a great answer for anti-Semites."It's a free world and you don't have to like Jews, but if you DON'T, I suggest that you boycott all Jewish products, like:
Be mad at us, if you like! Go on, boycott! But I'm telling you it ain't gonna feel so good." |
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While many white Americans fear being harmed by black people, history |
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| Ted Bundy (serial killer) | Ted Kuzinski (serial bomber) |
| John Wayne Gayce (serial killer) | Geoffrey Dahmer (serial killer) |
| Richard Speck (serial killer) | "Army of God" (serial killers) |
| Charles Manson (serial killer) | All of Manson's murderous followers |
| Timothy McVeigh (mass murderer) | Terry Nickles (McVeigh accomplice) |
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And let's not forget the world's greatest mass murderers of them all, the likes of Hitler and Stalin! |
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In contrast to these there have been few attacks by Blacks on Whites in America : |
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| One lone gunman's attack on Long Island train | |
| and the relatively minor attacks of the Black Panthers. | |
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Contact  [email protected] There is much more where this came from, at  and/or 
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