June 25, 2016

The part of ML King's Montgomery speech they don't talk about

One of the great failures American progressive activists has been their inability to understand - and then act upon - all that so many blacks and whites have in common, beginning with the inequities of the economic system. A rare exception was the populist movement of the late 19th century. It is ironic that populism is seen by many liberals today as an undisciplined, even radical force, when in fact it is the very concept that could keep whites from turning to people like Donald Trump. 

Someone who understood this was Martin Luther King Jr. In his famous 1965 speech in Montgomery he tackled the topic directly.  A couple of years ago, Sirius XM host Mark Thompson ran an excerpt from the speech that has gotten far too little attention: 

ML King - Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote. In focusing the attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the Southland.

Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, clearly points out, the segregation of the races was really a political stratagem employed by the emerging Bourbon interests in the South to keep the southern masses divided and southern labor the cheapest in the land. You see, it was a simple thing to keep the poor white masses working for near-starvation wages in the years that followed the Civil War. Why, if the poor white plantation or mill worker became dissatisfied with his low wages, the plantation or mill owner would merely threaten to fire him and hire former Negro slaves and pay him even less. Thus, the southern wage level was kept almost unbearably low.

Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. 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 posts of political power in the South.

To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. 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. He gave him 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.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Thanks for this extremely important piece of ignored history. No wonder "they" (conspiracy theory implication notwithstanding) did him in. The man was really "on" to the reality underlying much that tarnishes American life, the manipulation of events to suit established power.

Anonymous said...

He also said at Montgomery that the White churches had been segregated from Christianity.

Unknown said...

My mistake not to have kept a copy of my original full comment: I'll say it now, as I intended it - the parallel King drew between the "false" food of Jim Crow filling empty psychic bellies of poor whites, and, in parallel, the "food" of fundamentalist Christianity ("Christ") filling the empty bellies of the southern black. Remarkable implication, coming from preacher MLK!

TheDailyLmo said...

Reminds me of Obama's treatment of the gays. Yes, you can possibly have marriage equality, but Obama isn't going to be the "fierce advocate" for workplace non discrimination.