In indicting white America for its ingrained and tenacious racism, I am using the term “white” to describe the majority, not all who are white. Because most white people are so far removed from the life of the average Negro, there has been little to challenge this assumption. Many whites who concede that Negroes should have equal access to public facilities and the untrammeled right to vote cannot understand that we do not intend to remain in the basement of the economic structure; they cannot understand why a porter or a housemaid would dare dream of a day when his work will be more useful, more remunerative and a pathway to rising opportunity. Why is the issue of equality still so far from solution in America, a nation that professes itself to be democratic, inventive, hospitable to new ideas, rich, productive and awesomely powerful? In the larger sense, police must cease being occupation troops in the ghetto and start protecting its residents. A Testament of Hope Summary and Analysis. Publisher: Harper Collins. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), civil rights leader and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace, inspired and sustained the struggle for freedom, nonviolence, interracial brotherhood, and social justice. It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. And what do you think this knowledge does to his soul? It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism and materialism. The black surge toward freedom has raised justifiable demands for racial justice in our major cities at a time when all the problems of city life have simultaneously erupted. Today’s dissenters tell the complacent majority that the time has come when further evasion of social responsibility in a turbulent world will court disaster and death. But we have seen a better and more constrictive cleansing process in our nonviolent demonstrations. A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr Editor: James M Washington Publisher: Harper Collins Read full review. The book consists of 57 selections from King's books, essays,sermons, speeches, and interviews, all of which work to give a broad picture of the thinking and accomplishments of this great American civil rights leader. When you go beyond a relatively simple though serious problem such as police racism, however, you begin to get into all the complexities of the modern American economy. As the human rights movement becomes more confident and aggressive, more nonviolently active, many of these emotional and intellectual problems will be resolved in the heat of battle, and we will not ask what is our neighbor’s color but whether he is a brother in the pursuit of racial justice. “ HATE CANNOT DRIVE OUT HATE: ONLY LOVE CAN DO THAT. I don’t believe we can have world peace until America has an “integrated” foreign policy. The Bureau of the Census has admitted a ten-percent error in this age group, and the unemployment statistics are based on those who are actually applying for jobs. Fortunately, we haven’t had this problem in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. So the party and the candidate that get the support of the Negro voter in national elections have a very definite edge, and we intend to use this fact to win advances in the struggle for human rights. There are now even Negro deputy sheriffs in such black-belt areas as Dallas County, Alabama. But the American Negro has in his nature the spiritual and worldly fortitude to eventually win his struggle for justice and freedom. Yet bombs in Vietnam also explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities for a decent America. Habitual white discrimination was transformed into white backlash. I think this essay still resonates today and should be more widely disseminated. LibraryThing Review User Review - erock71 - LibraryThing. Buy from amazon.com. Stephen Vincent Benét had a message for both white and black Americans in the title of a story, Freedom Is a Hard Bought Thing. But because of this very exploitation, Negroes bring a special spiritual and moral contribution to American life—a contribution without which America could not survive. Integration is meaningless without the sharing of power. Part 6 Interviews: Kenneth B.Clark interview (1963); "Playboy" interview - Martin Luther King Jr (1965); transcript of "Meet the Press" television news interview (1966); transcript of "Face to Face" television news interview (1967). A testament of hope by Martin Luther King Jr., unknown edition, When a culture begins to feel threatened by its own inadequacies, the majority of men tend to prop themselves up by artificial means, rather than dig down deep into their spiritual and cultural wellsprings. He often sees the Army as an avenue for educational opportunities and job training. This is why I remain an optimist, though I am also a realist, about the barriers before us. Inferior education, poor housing, unemployment, inadequate health care—each is a bitter component of the oppression that has been our heritage. But, I repeat, the recent curative steps that have been taken are, at best, inadequate. When we have won these—in a spirit of unshakable nonviolence—then, in luminous splendor, the Christian era will truly begin. We band together readily; and against white hostility, we have an intense and wholesome loyalty to one another. In our “arrogance, lawlessness and ingratitude,” we will fight for human justice, brotherhood, secure peace and abundance for all. So, although in one sense we are neither, in another sense we are both Americans and Africans. If we can just stop policemen from using profanity in their encounters with black people, we will have accomplished a lot. Rioting and violence provide no solutions for economic problems. Author: Martin Luther King. People are often surprised to learn that I am an optimist. The saying was also alive in the rabbinic tradition: Strack–Bill., 370. They know that life in the city ghetto of life in the rural South almost certainly means jail or death or humiliation. Americans who genuinely treasure our national ideals, who know they are still elusive dreams for all too many, should welcome the stirring of Negro demands. When millions of people have been cheated for centuries, restitution is a costly process. And while he stood there on his crutches, drinking from the fountain, he was beaten savagely by white hoodlums. This is what we mean when we talk about redeeming the soul of America. One of the incongruities of this situation is the fact that such a large number of the soldiers in the Armed Forces in Vietnam—especially the front-line soldiers who are actually doing the fighting—are Negroes. I don’t think there is a single major insurance company that hires Negro lawyers. 1968 was filled with turmoil as war, inflation, violence, urban decay and intense poverty confronted Americans. Everyone underestimated the amount of violence and rage Negroes were suppressing and the vast amount of bigotry the white majority was disguising. From inside the book . Cookies helfen uns dabei, das Benutzererlebnis zu verbessern. ISBN: 0060646918. When Rome began to disintegrate from within, it turned to a strengthening of the military establishment, rather than to a correction of the corruption within the society. An insistent question defied evasion: Was security for some being purchased at the price of degradation for others? Benign acceptance of second-class citizenship has been displaced by vigorous demands for full citizenship rights and opportunities. Title: A Testament Of Hope Author: wiki.ctsnet.org-Matthias Durr-2020-10-06-00-12-11 Subject: A Testament Of Hope Keywords: a,testament,of,hope Created Date President Johnson did respond realistically to the signs of the times and used his skills as a legislator to get bills through Congress that other men might not have gotten through. Just three years ago, a Negro could be beaten for going into the county courthouse in Dallas County; now Negroes share in running it. The Newark riots, for example, could certainly have been prevented by a more aggressive political involvement on the part of that city’s Negroes. How do you think it affects his view of the society he lives in? The success of these enlightened mayors is entirely dependent upon the financial support made available by Washington. We must simply fight at both the local and the national levels to gain as much community control as possible over the poverty program. After all, no other minority has been a constantly, brutally and deliberately exploited. In nearby Gage Park, the median educational grade level of the whites was 8.6 years, but the median income was $9600 per year. A Testament of Hope - King Jr., Martin Luther. And I think that this has led, as Senator Fulbright has said, to such a strengthening of the military-industrial complex of this country that the President now finds himself almost totally trapped by it. Acts chapter 7, Acts chapter 7. And from that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid. The anarchy of unplanned city growth was destined to confound our confidence. We have found that there are many white people who clearly perceive the justice of the Negro struggle for human dignity. They have been fed on a false mythology and tradition that blinds them to the aspirations and talents of other men. The summer poverty programs, like most other Government projects, function well in some places and are totally ineffective in others. Despite a decisive demand for change, Trump... Sign and send the petition to your U.S. senators: Focus on COVID-19 relief immediately, not Trump’s judicial nominations. I think that the place to start, however, is in the area of human relations, and especially in the area of community-police relations. They are dispersed in a manner that gives the appearance of change without any real prospect of actually shifting political power or giving Negroes a genuine opportunity to be represented in the government of their state. Document Date 1/1969 Genre On his way home, he went into a bus station at Americus, Georgia, to get a drink of water while waiting for his next bus. But not all is bad in the South, by any means. (1958); the burning truth in the South (1960); an address before the National Press Club (1962)_; the case against "tokenism": (1962); bold design for a new South (1963); the ethical demands for integration (1963); behind the Selma march (1965). Kennedy didn’t voluntarily submit a civil rights bill, nor did Lyndon Johnson. Before 1964, things were getting better economically for the Negro; but after that year, things began to take a turn for the worse. Naïve and unsophisticated though we may be, the poor and despised of the 20th Century will revolutionize this era. Justice for black people will not flow into society merely from court decisions nor from fountains of political oratory. Many whites hasten to congratulate themselves on what little progress we Negroes have made. But for the Negro GI, military service still represents a means of escape from the oppressive ghettos of the rural South and the urban North. It has seemed amazingly devoid of statesmanship; and when creative statesmanship wanes, irrational militarism increases. The past is strewn with the ruins of the empires of tyranny, and each is a monument not merely to man’s blunders but to his capacity to overcome them. Each will require billions of dollars to correct. Black men have slammed the door shut on a past of deadening passivity. Get this from a library! We have always enjoyed a relationship of mutual respect. A friend of mine is a lawyer, one of the most brilliant young men I know. DARKNESS CANNOT DRIVE OUT DARKNESS: ONLY LIGHT CAN DO THAT. The confrontation involves not only their morality but their self-interest, and that combination promises to evoke positive action. Look at the pattern of Federal referees in Mississippi, for example. 1991. Man has the capacity to do right as well as wrong, and his history is a path upward, not downward. I hope and feel that out of the universality of our experience, we can help make peace and harmony in this world more possible. When we replace the rabidly segregationist chairman of the Armed Services Committee with a man of good will, when our ambassadors reflect a creative and wholesome interracial background, rather than a culture heritage that is a conglomeration of Texas and Georgia politics, then we will be able to bring about a qualitative difference in the nature of American foreign policy. When nothing is done to alleviate their plight, this merely confirms the Negroes’ conviction that America is a hopelessly decadent society. And according to a recent Department of Labor statistical report, 24.8 percent of Negro youth are currently unemployed, a statistic that does not include the drifters who avoid the census takers. [1] Today it's available here. An exhaustive collection of the speeches, writings, and interviews with the Nobel Prize-winning activist. One of the most basic of these realities was pointed out by the President’s Riot Commission, which observed that the nature of the American economy in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries made is possible for the European immigrants of that time to escape from poverty. The Chicago Urban League recently conducted a research project in the Kenwood community on the South Side. As a matter of fact, I think the aura of paramilitarism among black militant groups speaks much more of fear than it does of confidence. The past record of the Federal Government, however, has not been encouraging. Part 4 Famous sermons and public addresses: "give us the ballot - we will transform the South" (1957); if the negro wins, labour wins (1962); the American dream (1961); "I have a dream" (1963); eulogy for the martyred children (1963); Nobel Prize acceptance speech (1964); "our God is marching on!" I don’t think the nonwhites in other parts of the world can really be of any concrete help to us, given their own problems of development and self-determination. This may seem like a lot of money and, to most of us, it is; but the point is that this young man’s background and abilities would, if his skin color were different, entitle him to an income many times that amount. frankenstein depression night perseverance south park overpopulation human rights discourse community argumentative translation fsu penn state university marijuana advertisement analysis profile. Even our emotional life has been disciplined and sometimes stifled and inhibited by an essentially European upbringing. [Martin Luther King, Jr.; James Melvin Washington] Search Categories . Weitere Informationen finden sich in unserer, The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King. After World War Two, the GI Bill did offer some hope for a better life to those who had the educational background to take advantage of it, and there was proportionately less turmoil. And one of these roads to escape will be a more equitable sharing of political power between Negroes and whites. Men of the white West, whether or not they like it, have grown up in a racist culture, and their thinking is colored by that fact. Without this magnificent ferment among Negroes, the old evasions and procrastinations would have continued indefinitely. If we don’t, our society will crumble. Our education has been Western and our language, our attitudes—though we sometimes tend to deny it—are very much influenced by Western civilization. A Testament of Hope: A Survivor's Guide to Cultural Evangelicalism | Dolby, James, Ph.D. | ISBN: 9780805953817 | Kostenloser Versand für alle Bücher mit Versand und Verkauf duch Amazon. After 13 months in a veterans’ hospital, he went back to his home town of Attapulgus, Georgia. Ultimately, there is a larger force at work. In these trying circumstances, the black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. A testament of hope. For much of the fervent idealism of the white liberals has been supplemented recently by a dispassionate recognition of some of the cold realities of the struggle for that justice. They still had a sense of inferiority; and not until they were bolstered by the presence of our staff and given reassurance of their political power and the rightness of their cause and the justness of their grievances were they able and willing to sit down and talk to the police chief and the city manager about the conditions that had produced the riot. Solutions for these problems, urgent as they are, must be constructive and rational. In Cleveland, 58 percent of the young men between the ages of 16 and 25 were estimated to be either unemployed or underemployed. Buy Book From Amazon . Nor will a few token changes quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people. We don’t need to look for help from some power outside the boundaries of our country, except in the sense of sympathy and identification. But the American economy today is radically different. Let me make it clear that I don’t think white men have a monopoly on sin or greed. In less than two decades, he has roared out of slumber to change so many of his life’s conditions that he may yet find the means to accelerate his march forward and overtake the racing locomotive of history. Words. Were he a white lawyer, I have no doubt that he would be in a $100,000 job with a major corporation or heading his own independent firm. Still, when doubts emerge, we can remember that only yesterday Negroes were not only grossly exploited but negated as human beings. On these grounds, I must indict the Johnson Administration. View: 907. In the year that marks the 40th anniversary of the victory of the Vietnamese people, let us read the last will and testament of Ho Chi Minh. So there are some changes. But there is no single answer to the plight of the American Negro. The President’s Riot Commission recommended that funds for summer programs aimed at young Negroes should be increased. Martin Luther King Jr. published in. This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member. In fact, most of our concrete accomplishments have been limited largely to the South. Schools, transportation, water supply, traffic and crime would have been municipal agonies whether or not Negroes lived in our cities. The January 1969 issue of Playboy contained a symposium: The Decent Society ("11 contributors have done no less than create a blueprint for change throughout every important aspect of American life"), and a memoriam for MLK & RFK. And so, by comparison, military service is really the lesser risk. Millions of Americans are coming to see that we are fighting an immoral war that costs nearly 30 billion dollars a year, that we are perpetuating racism, that we are tolerating almost 40,000,000 poor during an overflowing material abundance. But in places like Chicago, where poverty programs are used strictly as a tool of the political machinery and for dispensing party patronage, the very concept of helping the poor is defiled and the poverty programs becomes just another form of enslavement. Our challenge, rather, is to organize the power we already have in our midst. This situation is social dynamite. Part 3 Political - wedged between democracy and black nationalism: facing the challenge of a new age (1957); the rising tide of racial consciousness (1960); equality now - the President has the power (1961); the time for freedom has come (1961); in a word - now (1963); hammer on civil rights (1964); negroes are not moving too fast; civil right no.1 - the right to vote (1965); next stop - the North (1965). Sign the petition: TRUMP MUST IMMEDIATELY CONCEDE and Congress must ensure he steps down. America must change. In fact, both told us at one time that such legislation was impossible. A Testament of Hope contains Martin Luther King, Jr.'s essential thoughts on nonviolence, social policy, integration, black nationalism, the ethics of love and hope, and more. Even within the agencies of the Federal Government, most Negro employees are in the lower echelons; only a handful of Negroes in Federal employment are in upper-income brackets. It is a long chapter, but we’re not going to be literally ragging our way through this chapter. It is the most abrasive element in Negro-white relations, but it is the last to be scientifically and objectively appraised. Black men in positions of power in the business world would not be so unconscionable as to trade or traffic with the Union of South Africa, nor would they be so insensitive to the problems and needs of Latin America that they would continue the patterns of American exploitation that now prevail there. They fail, however, to perceive the sense of affirmation generated by the challenge of embracing struggle and surmounting obstacles. The Negro today cannot escape from his ghetto in the way that Irish, Italian, Jewish and Polish immigrants escaped from their ghettos 50 years ago. also have learned this basic lesson in human relations, thanks largely to Jimmy Baldwin and others who have articulated some of the problems of being black in a multiracial society. The Negro knows it, because he works in the white man’s house as a cook or a gardener. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced. They were invisible in their misery. a testament of hope Essay Examples. Martin Luther King Jr. was a deeply religious man and his belief guided his work. But the Negro community cannot win this victory alone; indeed, it would be an empty victory even if the Negroes could win it alone. They discovered that the average educational grade level of Negroes in that community was 10.6 years and the median income was about $4200 a year. The question that now faces us is whether we can turn the Negro’s disillusionment and bitterness into hope and faith in the essential goodness of the American system. The book consists of 57 selections from King's books, essays,sermons, speeches, and interviews, all of which work to give a broad picture of the thinking and accomplishments of this great American civil rights leader. And yet there it was, abroad in our own land. It was an economy that had room for—even a great need for—unskilled manual labor. It has shown him that he has the potential to participate in the determination of his own destiny—and that of society.
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