Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes
Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. ... We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Why We Can't Wait. Harper & Row, 1964, p. 120.
Published 100 years after it was written. This is the first known written statement of what became a de facto policy regarding the American Indian.
He had done an analysis of American History textbooks and found that 9 pages about American Indians and their history before and after Europeans came to America. He and most other historians consider that to be inadequate.
This quotation is often used as the greatest evidence the white usurpation of Indian land and the dubious value of all the treaties that had been made with the Indians guaranteeing them specific lands. Jackson, however, was not completely accurate. The Iroquois who fought on the American side in the Revolution were still on their lands in New York State. However, the Iriquois had their dealings with the State and local governments, and fared better than those tribes that depended in the Federal Government—especially with racists like Jackson in the Presidency.
It was not until this publication that people who suggested that discrimination and lack of education and opportunity might have something to do with the problem Blacks faced in society were regarded by many Americans as anything but left wing intellectuals.
Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills lands that were sacred to the Lakota Sioux and were reserved for exclusive use of the Indians by the Fort Laramie Treaty. Greedy whites, ignoring the treaty provisions not only entered the Black Hills to pan and mine for the gold, but killed many Indians they ran across Sherman was angry and wrote to his old friend President Grant. Grant, now a political, had to contend with public opinion that thought it absurd that gold should not be mined because a few Indians regarded the land as sacred. Meanwhile Grant was working with a few others to portray minor clashes between whites and Indians in the Black Hills as violent and dangerous Indians breaking the treaty.
Martin Luther King Jr. was an African American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the American civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. King advanced civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, inspired by his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi. He was the son of early civil rights activist Martin Luther King Sr.
