Mary Elizabeth Lease Quotes

This quotation was documented by an FBI illegal wiretap of King and his associates. The illegal wiretap had been insisted upon by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who was a racist and somewhat of a paranoid about communists. However, Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy personally approved the illegal wiretap.

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.

He was jailed for the speech.

Note that at the time feminism was classified with the other “radical”, dangerous isms. Also, many people just did not take any of these movements seriously. The perception was that the advocates were mentally unbalanced.

In the early 1950s, most of the South was racially segregated. Though hard to believe today, the Alabama law then required a Black man or woman to sit in the back of the bus. Rosa Parks, a black woman, sat in a seat in the middle of the bus and refused to give up her seat to a white man. She just quietly sat in her seat. She was arrested, and this triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 which was a major event in the Civil Rights struggle. Alabama was not the only state where this type of outrage occurred. The South at that time was relatively backward educationally, commercially, and legally and racial segregation was a huge problem in most of the South.

Kennedy was initially very opposed to a civil rights march on Washington and seemed very annoyed to the Blacks in attended. But when faced with the reality of the fact that the March was going to take place and he could not prevent it, he turned around and did everything he could do to protect the marchers and enable the historic event.

This paraphrased quote originated with Martin Luther King, Jr. See related quote.

The veiled threat of violence and disruption was a tactic that did not work.

This quotation is used by the moderate Egyptians and other moderate Arab leaders as well as Israelis and other experts in combating Islamic Fundamentalism to illustrate the thinking process of the Muslim fundamentalist terrorist leader. They are more than willing to sacrifice those they lead (though rarely themselves) if they think that something is to be gained. But if there is nothing to be gained, their “moral” responsibility requires not “wasting” their followers’ lives. Therefore, the way these experts believe they should deal with the radicals is to face them with overwhelming force (a variant of the Powell Doctrine) and never concede anything or let them gain anything from violence. A single concession makes the terrorism, sacrifice and violence worthwhile, but if there is no gain, the leader has wasted the lives of his followers and is less likely to initiate another attack.