Today we will reflect on the final Civil Rights struggles and causes championed by Martin Luther King before his untimely assassination in Memphis. We wonder: How did John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson differ in their support for civil rights for blacks? Why were the Civil Rights struggles in New […]
After the Selma march, Martin Luther King delivered another rousing speech. “They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said we would only get her over their dead bodies, but all the world together knows that we are here and that we are standing” in “Alabama saying, ‘Ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.’” “Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote.” “The threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and white masses alike resulted in establishing a segregated society. They segregated Southern money from the poor whites; they segregated Southern churches from Christianity; they segregated Southern minds from honest thinking, and they segregated the Negro from everything.” […]
MLK’s I Have a Dream Speech begins: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, 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 their captivity.” […]
In September 1963, a black church in Birmingham was dynamited, killing four young girls and injuring several dozen others. Addressing the nation on television, President Kennedy proclaimed, “This nation is committed to a course of domestic justice and tranquility.” “If these cruel and tragic events can awaken that city and state, if they can awaken this entire nation,” “then it is not too late for all concerned to unite in steps toward peaceful progress before more lives are lost.” But no whites attended the funeral services of these four young black girls. […]
Martin Luther King was vigorously campaigning for voting rights. In his first national address, he proclaimed, “Give us the ballot. Give us the ballot and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.” “Give us the ballot and we will fill the legislature with men of goodwill. Give us the ballot and we will get the people judges who love mercy. Give us the ballot and we will quietly, lawfully, and nonviolently, without rancor or bitterness, implement” the US Supreme Court Brown decision. Ensuring that blacks have the right to vote was the key civil rights objective in the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War. […]
The biographer David Levering Lewis writes, “By here dignified bearing during her arrest and arraignment, and because of her impeccable reputation in the black community, Mrs Parks’ defiance compelled the city to charge her explicitly with the violation of the municipal ordinance governing racial accommodation on publicly owned vehicles, and not, as was usually the case, with the elastic offense of disorderly conduct.” […]
The biographer David Levering Lewis observes that “the King family belonged to what is known as the school hard preaching, of which cult of personality, and occasional pinch of exploitation, and sulfurous evangelism are indispensable ingredients.” Martin’s maternal grandfather founded the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and his father, Martin Luther King Sr, grew it into one of the largest and most prestigious black Baptist Churches in Atlanta.
His family was known for their involvement with civil rights. After the disastrous 1906 Atlanta race riots, his maternal grandfather was one of the charter members of the local NAACP chapter. He helped defeat a local bond issue that did not fund any new black schools and was instrumental in advocating the building of Booker T Washington High School, the first school in Atlanta for secondary education. […]
One of Bonhoeffer’s most famous books carried the title, The Cost of Discipleship. In it he condemns what he calls cheap grace. He insists one cannot follow Christ without full commitment, wherever that commitment might lead. In his case it led to a Nazi gallows.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth were leaders in the Confessing Church that resisted the Nazi infiltration and cooption of German Christianity, opposing the Nazi notion that Jesus wasn’t Jewish and that Christianity should condone the persecution of the Jews. […]
David Frum writes, “Zelensky came to Washington to speak for his nation. He came to Washington to ask for assistance. But above all, he came to Washington to recall Americans to themselves. He came to say, My embattled people believe in you. Embedded in his words of trust was a challenge: If we believe in you, perhaps you can again believe in yourselves?” […]
The established dogma was that the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War was a dark period in American history, where black rule bred corruption and unwanted federal interference in the governments of the Deep South. WEB Du Bois counters by claiming that the Jim Crow Redemptionist Era following Reconstruction was the dark era when blacks lost the right to vote and any semblance of due process and fair play, that many blacks were, in effect, re-enslaved in a more brutal segregationist society, and that the Reconstruction was a time of greater democracy where the civil rights and liberties of all races and classes were respected. […]
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