Posted on 08/28/2013 10:23:40 AM PDT by LD Jackson
Today being the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have A Dream' speech it's appropriate to revisit part of that speech and see how his dream has progressed. The full transcript of his speech can be read here. I am going to focus on one tiny part.
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Have we as a society reached the point where we do not judge people based on the color of their skin? One need look no further than at all the affirmative action programs in the last fifty years to see the answer is clearly no. Racial preferences are nothing more than judging people based on the color of their skin. But, there are different opinions about the need for and effectiveness of affirmative action. Here are just a few pros and cons that I have found on affirmative action programs:
Eliminate It
There are, of course, many who believe affirmative action programs are needed and should stay in place. To those people I would say, you are trashing Dr. King's dream. If you truly believe in the ideals he espoused in his speech then you cannot support affirmative action. His dream and affirmative action are inconsistent. If you favor affirmative action then you are one of the people to whom Dr. King was speaking. Fifty years later, you are still keeping his dream from becoming reality.
NARRATION---MLK Jr. could hardly believe his eyes when he left the segregated South as a teenage college student to work on a tobacco farm in Connecticut (then a common practice for Southern college students who wanted summer jobs).
“On our way here we saw things I had never anticipated to see,” he wrote his father in June 1944. “After we passed Washington, DC, there was no discrimination at all. The white people here are very nice. We go to any place we want to and sit any where we want to.”
MLK spent that summer working in a tobacco field in the Hartford suburb of Simsbury with white and black students. That experience would influence his decision to become a minister and heighten his resentment of segregation.
“It’s clear that this little town, it made a huge impact on his life,” said John Conard-Malley, a Simsbury High School senior who did a documentary with other students on King’s experiences in Connecticut. “It’s possibly the biggest thing, one of the most important things, people don’t know about Martin Luther King’s life.”
Until then, King was thinking of becoming a lawyer, Conard-Malley said. But after his fellow students at the tobacco farm elected him their religious leader, he decided to become a minister.
In his later application to Crozer Theological Seminary King wrote that he made the decision that summer “when I felt an inescapable urge to serve society. In short, I felt a sense of responsibility which I could not escape.” “Perhaps if he hadn’t come to Connecticut, hadn’t picked tobacco up here, hadn’t felt like a free person, hadn’t felt what life was like without segregation and been elected the religious minister, he may not have become such a leader in the civil rights movement,” he said.
In a letter to his mother, King marveled over a trip he took to Hartford. “I never thought that a person of my race could eat anywhere but we ate in one of the finest restaurants in Hartford,” King wrote. “And we went to the largest shows there.” He wrote of going to the same church as white people.
His new calling as a religious leader was emerging, too. “I have to speak on some text every Sunday to 107 boys. We really have good meetings,” he wrote.
In a speech in Hartford in 1959, King recalled how hot it was working on the tobacco field and how he looked forward to relaxing on weekends in Hartford. Byer says King and other students often worked in temperatures that reached 100 degrees or higher. The students, who were earning money to pay for college, made about $4 per day, Byer said. They lived in a dormitory built at the edge of the tobacco field.
That taste of freedom in New England ended as King returned home. When he got to Washington, he had to ride the rest of the way to Atlanta in a segregated train.
“After that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation,” King wrote in his autobiography. “I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.”
Shortly before coming to Connecticut that summer, a Southern bus driver ordered MLK to give up his seat for a white passenger on the way to Atlanta.
King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, wrote in her memoir, “My Life With Martin Luther King Jr.” that her husband talked of the exhilarating sense of freedom he felt in Connecticut that summer.
Some day-—perhaps-—the truth may actually come out about Dr.MLK Jr. He drank, he smoked, worse....he was a NOTORIOUS womanizer and he worked closely with known Communists.
I know it politically incorrect to say this, but I don’t think he is sainthood material.
The saintly image of MLK was created by the same people who created the saintly image of JFK and Camelot. It’s all make believe.
Bill Clinton and Al Sharpton are the current versions. Are they saints? If you listen to the MSM, you would believe so.
See tagline.
True. MLK has been whitewashed, sanitized and placed on a pedestal so high in the clouds that he ranks among the pantheon of imaginary demi-gods. Good luck tearing that down.
Because JFK was assassinated, he was initially canonized. There were sooooooooooooo many myths about the Kennedys and all of this made up crap about Camelot....you would have thought it was something out of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
However....enough books have more recently been published by more balanced historians that have dealt with the very dark side of JFK and his family, the incessant womanizing, the vote buying etc....the awful way in which the Kennedy men treated their wives....the only saint to emerge from this disgusting family appears to have been Rose.
Not interested in tearing down MLK Jr anymore than I am in tearing down the Kennedys. I would like to see a more BALANCED approach-—particularly when analyzing MLK Jr’s character and associations, much as we have seen in later books about the Kennedys.
Liberals never shared Dr. King’s dream anyway.
"The soft bigotry of low expectations."
Senator Jesse Helms refused to vote for the King Federal holiday. He said that King was a womanizer of low morale character and probably a communist. Helms said that if King was so great a man and if there was no reason to hide the records on him, why were they put under lock and key until 2027? His “I have a dream” speech was largely plagerized and the night before he was shot he was holed up in a motel room with two white prostitutes, had sex with them, then beat the hell out of them. The FBI has all of this on tape. This is the man that got a Federal holiday in his honor. And has the years have passed, republicans, have joined with democrats to canonize him. What a joke.
Can we start a list of folks we’d like to see “...judged by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin.”????
Well....if I had my way....we would be naming many streets and schools after the late Sen. Jesse Helms. He was my all time favorite senator of my lifetime. Of course he is vilified as a reactionary ogre by the media.....but I find that true now of most of the people I have great admiration for including the late Sen. Joe McCarthy.
2. Students and workers starting at a disadvantage need a boost. Wrong. Everybody deserves freedom and opportunity.
3. Special preferences needs to be given to minorities to make up for years of discrimination. Wrong. That IS a continuation of discrimination.
4. Affirmative action is needed to break stereotypes.Wrong. Behavior over time breaks (and establishes) stereotypes.
Whittaker Chambers, too, was absolutely savaged and demonized by the media as they glorified and fawned over Alger Hiss.
Why is it that I feel I am on the wrong side of history?
Good lord
Right now even Rush is hyping King
Damn
And Beck...a lost cause on this
He may have felt all fuzzy in CT but believe me
Plenty of racism up north
Truth that is painful
If northern whites ever had blacks in the numbers we deal with down South
They would have been worse
My uncle once told me....you cannot fight City Hall....perhaps that applies to this as well.
Perhaps Rush and Glenn Beck are not familiar with the sordid aspects of MLK Jr.’s personal life...not many are...it has been well covered up.
Most people in public life (with the notable exception of the late Sen. Jesse Helms) seem to regard it as suicidal to take on MLK Jr.
I remember back in the 1980s you were automatically branded a racist and demonized if you opposed the federal King holiday.
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