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Monday, January 16, 2006

Notes on MLK Day

Posted by on January 16 at 15:13 PM

I spent my lunch hour listening to KUOW’s 2pm show, the Beat, where Seattle lawyer/author Drew Hansen gave a very interesting take on the details of Martin Luther King Jr.’s rise to power and the events surrounding his famous “I have a dream” speech. You can check out his conversation with host Megan Sukys here.


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The better speech that day was given by 23-year-old John Lewis who criticized the Federal Govt. for not doing enough to protect the Civil Rights workers in the South. He stunned the crowd by naming Don Harris, who was on Death Row in Georgia for voting rights civil disobedience. He also criticized Kennedy's pending Civil Rights bill.

Lewis represented the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a younger, more radical group than King's. The speech he planned to give, circulated beforehand, was objected to by other participants; it called Kennedy's civil rights bill "too little, too late," asked "which side is the federal government on?" and declared that they would march "through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did" and "burn Jim Crow to the ground–nonviolently." In the end, he agreed to tone down the more inflammatory portions of his speech, but even the revised version was the most controversial of the day, stating:

The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery. The nonviolent revolution is saying, "We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting hundreds of years. We will not wait for the President, nor the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands, and create a great source of power, outside of any national structure that could and would assure us victory." For those who have said, "Be patient and wait!" we must say, "Patience is a dirty and nasty word." We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually, we want our freedom, and we want it now. We cannot depend on any political party, for the Democrats and the Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence.

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