Speech concerning remembering the past, 1985

-9In Montgomery, 30 years ago in December, a small, tired black woman did just that. On her way home from work one evening, Mrs. Rosa Parks set in motion a movement that eliminated legal segregation in America in little more than a decade.

The day after her arrest, black women in Montgomery called for a boycott of the city's busses and a young minister – too new in town to have made any enemies – was named head of the Boycott Committee of the Montgomery Improvement Association, and Alabama – and soon the rest of the world – began to hear of Marthin Luther King.

Nonviolent protest was the only available avenue of expression for a largely voteless people – then only 3% of eligible blacks in Mississippi were permitted to vote, and 28 Southern counties with black populations of 82% or greater had not one single black registered voter, although several had more registered whites than there were whites eligible to vote.

But the protest that forced the elimination of the barriers of race from places of public accomodation and from the political process resulted from the willingness of young and old, black and white Americans to adopt the disciplines of nonviolence and hard work, and the demands of the changing political market place.

Their bodies – then – were weapons aimed directly at the heart of the beast.

Their votes – then – were a precious commodity, available not just to the highest bidder or most pleasing psyche, but to the candidate whose record and past performance held greatest promise for some delivery in the future.

-10But since that period of great activity, some serious changes have happened to us all.

The sun set on the '60s, and rose to illuminate the new Nixon era. A national negative mid set [sic] quickly became crystal clear. Idealism and vigor were replaced with cynicism and narcissism. Young people abandoned the war against racism and colonialism and turned inward, toward themselves.

As the sixties ended, a major portion of the population had severed all connection with the movement for equal rights and social justice in America. The 'me' generation had homsteaded the New Frontier.

They abandoned social concerns wholesale, rightly perceiving that their taxes were rising, but wrongly believing the increase came because of the lazy poor, and not because of the corporate evader or the military glutton.

Rhetoric about sharing the wealth became a scandalous exercise in consolidating wealth and power where they always were – away from children, away from the poor, away from people for whom wealth is an extra meal and power the ability to hide from the rent collector.

The 1970s were a decade of reaction and self indulgence of retreat from national responsibility. New affinities were formed while old alliances disintegrated. In Washington, the Great Society was replaced with malign neglect. A kind of life-boat ethic sailed into the national consciousness, the notion that we are all passengers on a global Titanic, a sinking ship without lifeboats enough to go around. Quite naturally, those to be pushed out of the lifeboats

-11-

constitute that portion of the population that is quickly becoming irrelevantto [sic] the productive process – the uneducated young and the useless aged, and most of those whose skins are dark.

But by 1975, the architect of avarice as social policy had been disgraced, dismissed from power, a care-free caretaker installed in his stead.

In 1976, we turned to the polls in record numbers to elect a man who clearly knew the words to our hymns – in less than a year he showed he'd forgotten the numbers on our paychecks.

He was dismissed in 1980, and then four years later, the people have spoken again. They've reinstalled the evil empire, and re-elected an amiable incompetent who clearly intends to take the federal government entirely out of the business of enforcing equal opportunity in America.

He intends to eliminate affirmative action for women and minorities.

They intend, in fact, to erase the laws and programs written in blood and seat [sic] in the twenty-five years since Martin King was the premier figure in Black America, and a majority of Americans was single-minded in pursuit of human freedoms.

As was true more than 100 years ago, a president desperate for power, entered into a illicit arrangement, not just with the unreconstucted south, but with the national unreconstructed mentality, that believed then as it does now that private profit and public arrogance could be pursued at the expense of the people living on the economic edge.

-12100 years later, it is happening again.

A constituency of the comfortable, the callous and the smug was recruited to form solid ranks ranks against the forgotten.

For four years we've suffered under a form of triage economics that has produced the first increase in American infant mortality rates in twenty years, and pushed poor and working poor, thousands of American families deeper and deeper into poverty.

They constitute a clear and present danger to the hopes and dreams of black Americans, and to the dream that Martin Luther King spoke of so movingly just a few short years ago.

By August of 1984, the Census Bureau reported that the number of people living in poverty had increased over the past four years by 9 million, the largest increase since these statistics were first collected over 20 years ago. The one-tenth of the Federal budget that provided assistance for low-income families absorbed one-third of the Reagan budget cuts. Three million children have been pushed off the school lunch line. 3000 children a day have fallen into poverty. Today, the poorest two-fifths of our population receives a smaller share of our national income, and the richest two-fifths a larger share than at any other time since 1947.

More black people are poor today – one of every three or 35.7% – than four years ago, more than at any time in the last twenty years. Nearly half – 46.7% – of all black children are poor. We are 12% of the national population, but 22% of those who slipped below the poverty line because of the President's policies.

While the wealthiest 4% of American families were gaining $35

-13billion dollars in after-tax income over the last four years, all black families, from the poorest to the richest, were being hurt, and the gap between black and white income grew larger.

After four more such years of economic recovery, black Americans may well have ceased to exist.

Equally evident is the danger all Americans face from an escalated arms race and increased American interference into the lives of our neighbors in this hemishpere and in other countries around the globe.

Invasion in Grenada, subervision and terror in Nicarauga, encouragement of white supremacy in South Africa, nuclear instability; these are the results of a newly minted American arrogance ratified again at the polls on election day.

What is frightening about the diminished life chances among black Americans at home, and the heightened chance of loss of all human life worldwide is not that so many our [sic] fellow citizens are not aware, but that many are aware and simply do not care.

The movement Martin Luther King lead succeeded becuse it summoned a large part of black Americans to group action, and because it enjoyed the endorsement of a large portion of white America as well.

Rebuilding that coalition of conscience ought to be priority [sic] for all of us over the next several years.

If Martin Luther King's memory is to be upheld, it will be done best by extending his life's work and making it real.