Speech concerning remembering the past, 1985

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COPYRIGHT 1985 BY JULIAN BOND

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This collection of anniversaries and celebrations - Martin Luther King's birthday in January, Black History Month in February - gives us the ocasion to look backward at what we were and forward at what we might become. That is history's lesson, if we care to learn it. For too many Americans today - the young, who cannot remember what they did not see, and their elders, who want to forget what they did not fight enough against, the past is easily forgotten and dismissed.

But we need to remember what was. Let me let the words of Martin Luther King put you back in that place, not even a lifetime ago.

In his letter from a Birmingham jail, he wrote:

"When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you

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Have to concoct an answer for a five-year old son and who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean? . . . . . When you are humilated day in and day out by nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored'; when your first name becomes 'boy' (However old you are) and your last name becomes 'John' and your wife and mother are never given the repected title 'Mrs." [sic]; hwen [sic] you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly on tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness' — the [sic] you will understand. . . ."*

Understanding — ourselves, our common past and common future — is what this occasion is about.

Thirty years ago in Alabama, a middle-aged department store seamstress refused to give up her seat on a bus so a white man could sit down.

Twenty-five years ago in North Carolina, four black young men refused to give up seats at a dime store lunch counter reserved for whites.

These small acts of passive resistance to American apartheid began the modern day civil rights movement, ushering in a period of mass protest and relative progress that was built, in turn, on other actions by other actors in the darker, more dangerous years that had gone before.

*Why We Can't Wait, Martin Luther King Jr., New York, Harper & Row, 1964.

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-3Mrs. Rosa Parks protest also helped create a new leader, a minister named Martin Luther King. He accepted the stewardship of Montgomery's movement against segregation bus seating, and his eloquest voice propelled him into the leadership of a growing national movement, a position he held until his assasination in 1968.

The modern civil rights movement, and the works of its prophet which we celebrate today, were constructed on a series of actions and events stretching back into the geginning [sic] of African slavery on American soil; from then until now, from Gabriel Prosser through Martin Luther King and our times today, there has been a certain continuity in this struggle.

Think if you will of the magnitude and cruelty of American slavery. 60 million live souls sailed from West Africa in chains — only 15 million survived the holocaust of the Middle Passage. Once here, the African quickly revolted against being another man's property — Hispanola in 1522; Cuba in 1533; Mexico in 1537 — a steady, bloody stream of revolt.

Overcoming that awful heritage and remembering those revolts ought to be part of today's celebration as well.

Martin Luther King would have been 56 years old had he been able to celebrate his birthday in 1985.

Had he lived until today, there's no doubt our world would be different than it is.

Because he did live, when he did we live in a world a little better than we might have, a world a little less filled with fear and hate.

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Had he lived, he would undoubtedly look at the world about him with some alarm.

For although black Americans have made some considerable accompishments in the years since Martin Luther King died, the movement he lead appears to be in some dissray [sic] and the gains he can claim some credit for achieving seem in some danger of being destroyed.

History may well record that Martin Luther King was the premier figure in the 20th century stuggle for economic and political justice for black people.

He was born into a world nearly as rigidly segregated by custom and law as is South Africa today.

Most black people South of the Mason Dixon line were only two generations away, away from slavery, a paycheck or two away from abject poverty. As a people, Blacks were generally politically impotent, educationally impoverished, economically bankrupt.

Among King's contributions were to give eloquent voice to the aspirations of black America, and to give life to a method of mass participation in the struggle for civil rights so that everyone — student, housewife, minister, every woman every man could become an agent of their own deliverence.

At the beginning of the 20th Century, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois set down a progam every movement ought to follow:

"We must complain. Yes plain, blunt complaint, ceasless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong — this is the acient [sic], unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it . . . . . . . . . . . .

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talent & toilets

Ga Tech} Georgetown}

Twenty years ago, there were riots at the Univ of Ga. when two black students tried to enter that school.

In less than an hour and a half, Ga. Tech will meet Ceorgetown

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