On the Martin Luther King of my Youth.
Posted in Commentary
Apr. 6, 2008 at 06:07
by BrendaBee
The above is as far as I got and then I stopped because I was telling what he was not and not as I wanted to tell. I wanted to tell what he was. It took a Black man to do that for me. Juan Williams (The Wall Street Journal o4/06/08) wrote the right words. I as a white woman and older civil rights worker could not because I somehow could not work thru my disillusion and heart break that somehow what he started had gone so wrong. So wrong that the first Black man to actually come within sight of the presidency of the United States would have spent 20 years worshiping the God of us all in the church of a virulent racist like Jeremiah Wright.
The words of Juan Williams:
"While speaking to black people, King never condescended to offer Rev. Wright-style diatribes or conspiracy theories. He did not paint black people as victims. To the contrary, he spoke about black people as American patriots who believed in the democratic ideals of the country, in nonviolence and the Judeo-Christian ethic, even as they overcame slavery, discrimination and disadvantage. King challenged white America to do the same, to live up to their ideals and create racial unity. He challenged white Christians, asking them how they could treat their fellow black Christians as anything but brothers in Christ.
When King spoke about the racist past, he gloried in black people beating the odds to win equal rights by arming "ourselves with dignity and self-respect." He expressed regret that some black leaders reveled in grievance, malice and self-indulgent anger in place of a focus on strong families, education and love of God. Even in the days before Congress passed civil rights laws, King spoke to black Americans about the pride that comes from "assuming primary responsibility" for achieving "first class citizenship."
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