Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

No one dropped out.

His strategy was to fill the jails of Birmingham, and asked the young people to help. The next days saw virtually all the Birmingham high school students our of school and in the streets protesting which was then against the un-Constitutional laws of Birmingham and Alabama. The students were arrested by the droves and the white authorities, believing that they were being firm against “radical lawbreakers”, fell into the trap, and became a travesty to most of the country and the rest of the world and the hundreds of jailed students beaten and assaulted raised the consciousness of whites as well as Blacks.

The law enforcement officers were the ones who broke the law when they beat and brutalized the peaceful civil rights marchers. The “white niggers” refer to the white marchers including clergy.

Lincoln had instituted the first draft in American History and it was terribly resented by many Americans. The draft laws allowed the wealthy and upper middle class to avoid service by paying a $300 fee of hiring a substitute just like in the Vietnam War the upper classes could get College Draft deferments. The mob led mostly by poor Irish, began by protesting the draft; then they attacked the mansions and houses of the wealthy; and then they went after Blacks. The Irish poor feared large numbers of Negroes coming out of slavery and competing for their jobs and lowering the prevailing wages. Blacks were beaten and lynched and 5,000 almost half of the then Negro population were driven to Brooklyn, New Jersey and the New York suburbs. It was the worst riot in United States History.

A Black church had been bombed in Birmingham, Alabama among the general racial indignity visited upon the Blacks of that city. King’s conversation was not generally known until 2003 when the secretly recorded conversations of the Kennedy Presidency were released, transcribed and analyzed. Shortly after the conversation, JFK called five white leaders of Birmingham and upbraided them about the lack of progress in Birmingham.

Malcolm was not an enthusiast of non violent, passive resistance a la Martin Luther King. He did not generally advocate general violence per se, but did preach the doctrine of the 21st century National Rifle Association: That everyone should be armed and use the weapons to thwart criminal attacks on them and their families. However at the time, many police departments commonly broke the law and attacked Blacks in many ways. If Malcolm had more followers there could easily have been armed pitched battles between blacks who had been attacked and police who even if their colleagues had violated the law, would not allow citizen armed defense. The non-violence of King and others, accomplished the objective with relatively few people killed and wounded. They were virtually all Black or white sympathizers however. The racists bore no physical casualties but their culture and way of life was destroyed.

He had written this text on a newspaper when he was jailed in Birmingham for violating a court order not to demonstrate. A common tactic of the Southern segregationists was to have local segregationist judges issue injunctions against civil rights demonstrations on the grounds that they would promote violence. These were generally unconstitutional, but King and others were jailed until the legal appeal could even be heard.

At that time the law prohibited Negroes from sitting anywhere in a public bus except the rear. Blacks, if there were not enough rear seats had to stand in the back even if there were many vacant seats in the “white section” of the bus. This was typical of the racial discrimination that existed at that time. That is what all the civil rights demonstrations and boycotts of that era was all about—eliminating government discrimination against Blacks. The Federal Courts including the Supreme Court ruled that the bus segregation was unconstitutional, and the awful practice ended in Montgomery.

Wilson, a history and government professor and college president before politics, was has been accused of being one of the most racist Presidents since Reconstruction. Prior to his Presidency, the Federal Government had been making steady progress in hiring African Americans. Under Wilson there was a wholesale firing of a large proportion of them. Some apologists argue that his League of Nations and other major aspirations required the votes and cooperation of Southern Senators who insisted that many of the blacks be terminated. At the same time, the KKK was near the zenith of its membership and political power and was an intimidating force. Wilson’s home state of New Jersey not only had a large KKK membership but there were lynching of Blacks in his own state and when Governor and President he never asked for any anti-lynching legislation.

Parker and other escaped slaves in Christiana fought off slave catchers and killed the slave owner leading them. Charged with treason, he escaped to Canada with his family and lived there the rest of his life. While not a polished writer, after he himself had escaped and went to Christiana and leaned to read and write. He wrote this narrative of his life as a slave—one of the few written works we have from slaves.

In 2013, Congress awarded its highest honor to the 4 young Black girls who were murdered in Birmingham, Alabama at the height of the Civil Rights Movement by the KKK who set off a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church. She was sister of Addie Mae Collins, one of the murdered girls, who herself was blinded in one eye and scarred badly in the bombing, refused the medal on behalf of her dead sister. She resented the fact that it had taken all these years for Congress to make this gesture and then would not do anything that might cost money such as monetary restitution. When the Muslim terrorists murdered people in the 9-11 World Trade Center attacks she and her husband observed, Congress swiftly arranged for restitution payments to go to the relatives of the murdered victims and to those wounded. However to her and many other people, when white terrorists murder black victims no monetary restitution many comes forth—only a medal. Although she cleaned houses for a living, she has had to pay medical costs out of her own pocket—she had no insurance then and could not get it until Obamacare as it was a “previous condition”. She has never even been reimbursed for those out of picked medical costs caused by white terrorists whose motives many racists still approve of.

His home was right in the midst of the major riot area. The government had just instituted the draft to provide soldiers for the Civil War. The rich could avoid the draft by paying a modest fee. The Irish of New York were at just slightly above the Negro in the New York Socioeconomic scale and the two groups competed for the low skilled jobs. Many Irish felt that they were being forced to fight to free the Southern Negroes who when free would come to New York and compete for their jobs. They rioted and killed over 100 Blacks.

Justice Marshall, in he early career played an extremely important role in the development of the law vis a vis race and discrimination in America. He went from town to town in the Jim Crow, segregated South filing and often winning civil rights lawsuits. This was an era where lynching was still prevalent, and he was often threatened with bodily harm or death. Justice Ginsberg who also had been a leader in filing and winning civil rights suits but she worked in the area of women’s rights. The host had stated that she and Marshall were the great legal pioneers in civil rights litigation. Ginsberg explained that she hers was a much easier role and Marshall should receive much more credit. This was her reason.