SantaCruzen
03-05-2008, 10:00 PM
Martin Luther King, Jr. was not born into poverty yet he did realize that poverty causes civil rights injustice. Dr. King, Jr. was not a racist activist. Racism was not his dream. His dream was more visionary:
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
This shortened version of chapter six of Stride Toward Freedom appeared in the September issue of Fellowship
"Often the question has arisen concerning my own intellectual pilgrimage to nonviolence. In order to get at this question it is necessary to go back to my early teens in Atlanta. I had grown up abhorring not only segregation but also the oppressive and barbarous acts that grew out of it. I had passed spots where Negroes had been savagely lynched, and had watched the Ku Klux Klan on its rides at night. I had seen police brutality with my own eyes, and watched Negroes receive the most tragic injustice in the courts. All of these things had done something to my growing personality. I had come perilously close to resenting all white people.
I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice. Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort, I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me. During my late teens I worked two summers, against my father's wishes--he never wanted my brother and me to work around white people because of the oppressive conditions--in a plant that hired both Negroes and whites. Here I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro. Through these early experiences I grew up deeply conscious of the varieties of injustice in our society."
From Volume 4: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957- December 1958:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/papers/vol4/580901-002-My_Pilgrimage_to_Nonviolence.htm
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
This shortened version of chapter six of Stride Toward Freedom appeared in the September issue of Fellowship
"Often the question has arisen concerning my own intellectual pilgrimage to nonviolence. In order to get at this question it is necessary to go back to my early teens in Atlanta. I had grown up abhorring not only segregation but also the oppressive and barbarous acts that grew out of it. I had passed spots where Negroes had been savagely lynched, and had watched the Ku Klux Klan on its rides at night. I had seen police brutality with my own eyes, and watched Negroes receive the most tragic injustice in the courts. All of these things had done something to my growing personality. I had come perilously close to resenting all white people.
I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice. Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort, I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me. During my late teens I worked two summers, against my father's wishes--he never wanted my brother and me to work around white people because of the oppressive conditions--in a plant that hired both Negroes and whites. Here I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro. Through these early experiences I grew up deeply conscious of the varieties of injustice in our society."
From Volume 4: Symbol of the Movement, January 1957- December 1958:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/papers/vol4/580901-002-My_Pilgrimage_to_Nonviolence.htm