Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968 ) was an American civil rights leader who helped to overturn America’s racist laws. He read Gandhi and found a way to change America without violence. He was shot dead in Memphis in 1968. Although he was never president or even a senator or a general, he was still one of the greatest Americans of all time. The third Monday in January is a holiday in America to honour him.
Most people when they think of King think of him giving the “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. But the picture that sticks in my mind was when he was arrested five years before in Alabama.
I saw that picture when I was little. I asked my mother about it – it must be some kind of mistake. She said no, he broke the law. That made the picture an even deeper mystery: why would a good man break the law?
Because not all laws are just. Like bones, sometimes you must break laws to set them straight.
In the 1600s and 1700s blacks were brought from Africa to America in chains to work the land as slaves. It was a crying injustice that broke the nation in two in the middle of the 1800s: the free states in the North fought a terrible war against the slave states in the South.
The North won the war and freed the slaves. But then the South passed laws based on the colour of a man’s skin – the Jim Crow laws. And it went beyond mere laws: a whole society was built nakedly on the idea that all men are not created equal.
Blacks, for example, had to sit at the back of the bus: any seats in the front had to be given up to whites who wanted them.
Then one day in 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat: she was sick and tired of being sick and tired. She was arrested. She was not the first black person to do that, but a young Christian minister, fresh from school, was able to turn that simple act into a mass movement where blacks stopped riding the buses in that city and so got the law changed. That young minister was Martin Luther King, Jr.
He went on and showed ordinary black people throughout the South how they could change the country if they stood together as one. He showed ordinary white people, through their television sets, the country’s shame through pictures, like with the march on Selma in 1965.
That and other things led to the overturning of the Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s.
Racism is more than just bad laws and racism is still far from over, yet all that made possible this day, January 20th 2009, when a black man will become president of the United States of America for the first time in history.
– Abagond, 2009.
See also:
- Jim Crow
- Barack Obama
- Race in America
- video, speeches, writings, etc:
- 1963
- 1967
- 1968
- Quoting MLK
- Martin Luther King also said…
- Malcolm X
- Jim Crow
Abagond 
Lets straighten out history a bit as it might actually ease some racial tensions on the slavery subject. Yes, slavery was evil and I will never understand how anyone can feel that they have the right to own another individual – morally it is just wrong. But the fact is this, the white man did not sail into Africa and round up slaves, the black leaders of that region gathered their own people and then sold them off. How come this is never taught in school and never mentioned when we speak of slavery. You can’t heal the pain of a history if you don’t know the truth to begin with.
LikeLike
Ron: That factoid has little or no bearing on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow in the US. What matters here is our legacy with respect to relationships between black and white Americans — slavery followed by de jure segregation followed by de facto segregation. This hardly makes the United States unique, by the way. Slavery and embedded caste systems based on ethnicity are probably more common than not, including throughout most of Africa.
What does make the United States unique in history is our effort as a society to end slavery, de jure segregation, and de facto segregation, and to thereafter integrate a formerly lower caste minority into mainstream society. We have invested ourselves in this effort so deeply that we have, among other things, enacted laws mandating discrimination against the majority ethnic group for the purpose of creating opportunity for the minority.
The effort has catalyzed a sea change in the United States with respect to the opportunity afforded African Americans. I am not aware of another nation or society that has voluntarily elevated a previously lower caste ethnic group to a level where opportunities such as national presidency are available to it. Obamba’s inaguration is a milestone of the success of that undertaking. It’s certainly not the marker for the end of the road, but it does evidence the vast progress made since the days of MLK, Jr.
LikeLike
ron: I hear that all the time:
https://abagond.wordpress.com/2008/07/07/the-slave-trade-was-immoral/
LikeLike
So……..if someone offers to sell you something you are obligated to buy it? Got it. The next time I hear about the concept of ‘free will’ I will remember that. If only the people who took part in the slave trade knew that someone was keeping score and their actions had little to do with their conscience but was actually a game of who was worse. True Christianity indeed.
LikeLike
This day April 4th 1968 MLK was assassinated may he rest in peace.
LikeLiked by 2 people
@ Mary
Thank you for remembering. It is a day I will never forget.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on Project ENGAGE.
LikeLike