Speech concerning remembering the past, 1985

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There is opportunity available for us all. There are a host of organizations devoted to making King's dream come true. Each of them badly needs volunteers and contributions. There are candidates who need help to win and office holders who ought to be defeated. There are schoolchildren who need special help and a host of others who cry out for assistance.

There is a world waiting out there for us to win. The year James Earl Ray shot down Martin Luther King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders reported that we were two societies in America, black and white, drifting further and further apart.

The last four years have widened the gap between those who have and those who don't and hastened the necessity for agressive political action against those who want to destroy the dream and replace it with there [sic] nightmare.

If the people of this country who work for their living and do not live on the wages of other [sic]; the parents who want schooling and care – not just warehous-ng – for their children; the workers who want maximum minimums, if all these people can be made to see their common interest, then the tide can turn.

There is no utopia. There are no detailed blueprints, because our politics must focus on the real issues – power, wealth, and human needs – if we are to move toward a more humane society.

To look backward to an imaginary golden age is to surrender our futures to private greed, to increasing concentrations of wealth and power, to the continuing economic crisis which the un-

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checked race for profit submits us all.

Holding on to cictories [sic] won only twenty short years ago requires that no method or means ought to be discounted.

Even one less valued now – appeals to conscience, justice and fair play – ought be employed; a people in extreme cannot afford to turn their back on any possible weapon which may produce the motive for doing right.

Doing right, after all, is what this life is all about.

Over three quarters of a century ago, the late scholar W.E.B. DuBois put down on paper an antidote to the kind of political violence he saw about him them, and we yet see about us today.

He said then:

"I believe in God who made of one blood all nations that dwell on earth. I believe that all men, black and brown, and white, are brothers, varying, through time and opportunity, in form and gift and feature, but differing in no essential particular, and alike in soul and in the possibilty of infinite development.

Especially do I believe in the Negro race; in the beauty of its genius, the sw-etness of its soul, and its strength in that meekness which shall inherit this turbulent earth.

I believe in pride of race and lineage itself; in pride of self so deep as to scorn injustice to other selves; in pride of lineage so great as to despise no man's father; in pride of race so chivalrous as neither to offer bastardy to the weak nor beg wedlock of the strong, knowing that men may be brothers in Christ, even though they

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I believe in service –– humble, reverent service, from the blackening of boots to the whitening of souls; for work is heaven, idleness hell, and wages is the "welldone'." of the matter who summoned all them that labor and are heavy laden, making no disctinction [sic] between the blacks sweating cotton-hands of Georgia and the first families of Virginia, since all distinction not based on deed is devilish and not divine.

I believe in the devil and his angels, who wantonly work to narrow the opportunity of struggling human beings, especially if they be black; who spit in the faces of the fallen, strike them that they cannot strike again, believe the worst and work to prove it, hating the image which their maker stamped on a brother's soul.

I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that war is murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadacio of oppression and wrong; and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations white and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.

I believe in liberty for all men; the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedon to choose their friends; enjoy the sunshine and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of God and love.

I believe in the training of childen Black even as white;

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the leading out of little souls into the green pastures and beside the still waters, not for self or peace, but for life lit by some large vision of beauty and goodness and truth; lest we forget, and the sons of the fathers, like Esau, for mere meat barter their birth-right in a mighty nation.

Finally, I beleive [sic] in patience –– patience with the weakness of the weak and the strength of the strong, the prejudice of the ignorant and the ignorance of the blind; patience with the tardy triumph of joy and the mad chastening of sorrow –– patience with God"*

*W.E.B. DuBois, the Independent (N.Y.) October 6, 1904.