December 15, 2014

A half century ago ML King described what the American right is up to today

Martin Luther King Jr: Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March, 1965-    Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. (Listen to him) That is what was known as the Populist Movement. The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command post of political power in the South.

To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. ... Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.

If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow.  And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. And he ate Jim Crow. And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, their last outpost of psychological oblivion.

3 comments:

Tyler Healey said...

I'm not sure what you mean, Sam. I do notice that Republicans take a great amount of pride in not being liberals.

SammyJohnson said...

It's not that hard to understand, Tyler. Using racism as a wedge to divide people.

tal said...


Divide & Rule