MLK Talks 'New Phase' Of Civil Rights Struggle, 11 Months Before His Assassination | NBC News

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king von ocher roll 27:36 dr. King, this church is as good a place as any to review your commitment to the

civil

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movement. Well, you left here for college and then you went to Montgomery, Alabama, and started the bus boycotts there. What was the philosophy of civil rights? movement as you saw it then over ten years ago well, I would say the philosophy then was that we must do everything possible to use legal and non-violent methods to obtain full citizenship rights for the black people of our country, of course, that particular fight and that philosophy focuses on breaking all the barriers of legal segregation, so I would say that in that period the basic impetus for obtaining citizenship rights for blacks was to end the humiliation that surrounded to the entire system of legal segregation.

King, was there something peculiar about where you started and the type of people you attracted? I mean by that there was a strong attachment on the part of your parishioners in Montgomery to the church. They were older people, right? Yes, I would say. They were generally older people who participated in the boycott because they were the ones who used the bus more than anyone else and Montgomery was a predominantly Church Senate community, so it was very easy to reach the vast majority of blacks because they were from some way connected to a church in the community, in addition to your commitment to the idea of ​​nonviolence, wasn't that also the only thing you could do with the white community that once had a monopoly?

If you had tried violence, they would have done it. I confronted him with violence, it was the only recourse available to you, wasn't it okay? I put it another way: morally I was led to nonviolence because I felt it was the best moral way to address the problem we were looking for. establish a just society and I felt then and feel now that violence is certainly much more socially destructive and creates many more social problems than it solves, so I was led to non-violence for deep moral reasons. There is no doubt about the fact that in our

struggle

in Montgomery and throughout America, nonviolence is also practically sound, it simply would not be practical for the Negro to resort to violence;

He has neither the instruments nor the techniques of violence that we have. ten or eleven percent of the nation's total population and I would say we have about a tenth of one percent of the firepower, so it would be totally impractical, reckless and unrealistic for black people to think about violence . Well, I saw this in In the Beginning and Montgomery, but this was not the basic reason why I turned to nonviolence and believed in it as a philosophy. I turned to it because I felt it was the morally excellent way to address the problem of racial injustice in In our country there is something about nonviolence that made it and I used it in the past tense that made it more useful among other blacks than the blacks of the northern ghetto.

I would say there's something that makes it more useful to black people in the South, I think. It is true that we have had more nonviolent movements in the south because the problem for many years was more crystallized and in a certain sense more visible in the south. We didn't have many massive-scale civil rights activities in the North until three years. or four years ago, so I would say we simply haven't had the opportunity to experiment on a large scale with nonviolence in the northern ghetto. I have the feeling that nonviolence is as applicable and viable in the northern ghetto as it is.

It's in the South now there's bigger work there the frustrations at some points are much deeper the bitterness is deeper and I think that's because in the South we can see pockets of progress here and there, we really have made some progress They are very visible and every black man in the south knows that he can do things today that he couldn't do four or five years ago, where and in the north the black man sees his decline and it is not as easy for him to focus his vision on his objective as before. goal of the opposition as it does in the south, therefore, this is made for desperation and men consider that cynicism is a feeling that you cannot win and it simply means that we have to develop a massive job in the mouth organization and mobilization of forces. and resources to deal with the problem and there have been ghettos in the North just as we have in the South when in the South, particularly in Alabama, there were visible villains Jim Clark Bull Connor cattle prods police dogs, but in the North there were no No having those visible villains, isn't it difficult to get your people incited and led?

It's something that's not visible, well that's exactly right and this is what I was saying when I said it's harder to see your target in the South in the non-violent world. In the movement we were always helped by the brutality of our opponent. It's not the same in the north. The other thing is that there is no legal segregation in the north like there is in the south, so it is much more difficult. to make people see exactly what you are doing, but it is not an impossible job, it is difficult, sometimes it is tedious work, to get people to wake up from their apathetic slumber, but I still feel that black people in the north can be motivated just as they were motivated in the south and I think it's about time that the increasing economic deprivation in the black community continues, it will be even easier because people will come to deceive us and not only is something wrong in general but something is wrong in particular in their own economic and housing situations, what is it?

I mean, how do you find it? It is very subtle in the north. It's not subtle but it's becoming much more visible? Anyone can see that schools are more segregated in the North today than they were in 1954, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision declaring segregation unconstitutional, anyone can look around the ghetto and see that the ghetto schools are predominantly segregated and lacking in quality, Anyone who moves through a major ghetto in our country will see housing conditions that people don't have to see. They must be reminded that they are forced to live in slums and, in many cases, often the rat-infested vermin sit in slums and it did not take them long to see the exploitation that the black man faces in the ghetto where he is forced to pay more for less and constantly. trying to make ends meet, but because we don't have a job as a result of unemployment, our job is so economically unprofitable that the person can earn it, I mean, and I think they see all these things and more and more they come to see them Because before the people of the North looked towards the South and supported the

struggle

s of the South, now they are realizing that their problems are very real and they have organized themselves to deal with them.

Was there anything hypocritical about the fact that the South existed, the North could point the finger, and then when the civil rights laws were passed in the early '60s, the North could no longer point the finger. Well, there was no doubt about the hypocrisy of large segments of the nation on the whole race issue. equality I think the best example is that many of the northern and western senators and congressmen in general who voted for the civil rights legislation in 6 to 4 and even 6 to 5 for the voting rights bill refused last year to vote in favor of civil rights legislation. because it was an issue applicable to the north, the whole question of housing and this seems to me to have been the greatest expression of the hypocrisy of many of our citizens and many of the senators and congressmen of the null, but isn't that part of the dilemma now that people knew that black people were being denied what the Constitution guaranteed them by the fact that they were citizens of this country and then when they were given those rights, do you think the white community said well, Have we given them all? what we have now depends on them, well, I think the dilemma is much deeper and I think that during this transition period one has to be very honest with the United States and honesty drives me to admit that the United States still has broad racial elements. alive, racism still exists. in American society in many areas of northern southern society and the other thing is that there has never been a single strong and determined commitment from large segments of the white chamber of the United States on the general issue of racial equality.

I think we have to see that hesitation has always existed and this to me is the so-called white reaction, it is simply a new name for an old phenomenon. I see the white backlash as a continuation of the same ambivalence and hesitancy of white America and the entire issue of racial justice that has existed since the founding of our nation. I think the other thing we need to see right now is that a lot of the people who supported us in Selma in Birmingham were really outraged by extremist behavior towards black people, but they weren't at the time and now we're not engaged in real equality for blacks, it is much easier to integrate a lunch counter than to guarantee an annual income, for example, to eliminate poverty for blacks and all the poor, it is much easier to integrate a bus than to do genuine integration of reality and quality education a reality in our schools it is much easier to integrate even a public park than to get rid of slums and I believe that we are in a new era, a new

phase

of the struggle in which we have gone from a The fight for decency that characterized our fight for 10 or 12 years as a fight for genuine equality and this is where we are meeting the resistance because there was never any intention to go this fall, people were reacting to Bull Connor and Jim Clarke instead of acting. in good faith for the realization of genuine equality Do you believe that white people in this country and I am talking about non-segregationist people lack or think they are free of racism?

Do you have any idea what they want black people to be in America? Well, it depends on the level at which we are talking here because I think there is a distinction to be made between people who are genuinely and absolutely committed in the white community to the issue of racial equality and I must confess that I think they are a very minority. small, I think the vast majority of white Americans will go, but so far it's kind of a quota plan for equality and they're always looking for an excuse to go, but so far, why are they looking for the excuse?

What about black people? I mean all the other groups that came as immigrants somehow not easily, but somehow they avoided it, it's just the fact that black people are black that's part of it and the growth comes from something else, you can't think about nothing without depersonalizing. that something if you use something as a means to an end at that moment you turn it into a thing and consider it personally the fact is that the black man was a slave in this country for 244 years that act was a voluntary thing that was Don de Negro was brought and changed, treated in a very human way and this led to the situation of the black man, so he was not seen as a person, he was not seen as a human being with the same status and value as others. human beings and the other thing is that human beings cannot continue to do evil without eventually rationalizing that evil, so slavery was justified morally biologically theoretically if scientifically everything else and it seems to me that white America must see that no another ethnic group has been slaves. on American soil, that is one thing that other immigrant groups have had to face, the other thing is that color became a stigma.

American society made black people a stigma and that can never be overlooked, so I think these things are absolutely necessary. The United States freed the slaves in 19, I'm in 1863 through Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, but it gave the slaves no land, nothing really, and in fact, to begin with at the same time, the United States was giving away million acres of land. in the West and the Midwest, which meant that there was a willingness to give Europe's white peasants an economic base and yet it refused to give its black African peasants, who came here involuntarily in chains and had worked free for 244 years, any type of economic base and therefore emancipation for the black was really freedom to hang, it was freedom from the winds and the rains of the sky, it was freedom without food, attention to a land to cultivate and, Therefore, it was freedom and famine at the same time and when white Americans tell the black man to pull himself up by his bootstraps they should not look at the legacy of slavery and segregation.

I think we should do all we can and try to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, but it is a cruel joke to tell a useless man that he should pull himself up by his bootstraps, and many blacks, by the thousands and millions, have been left without boots as a result of all these years of oppression and as a result of a society that deliberately made her color a stigma and something like that. useless and degrading apart from wanting to live better, which we all want to do to raise our children better, so that they are better, does the black person in the United States know what he wants to be?

I'mconvinced that almost all black people in this country, plus those who have become so scarred by the system that they have become pathological in the process and we all have to fight the pathology, no one really knows what it means to be black unless that one can really experience it and I know that we all have to live it. We struggle with this constant leak of a pleasant nobody feeling, but despite this, I think the vast majority of black people in this country know that they want to be people, they want to be men, they want equality and that's it, it all comes down to that and we.

We have not been able to be people, we have not been men because of all the conditions we have experienced and the deprivation syndrome that surrounds the conditions more than housing in the economic area or in schools in the vicious credit practices that we face in the ghetto. and all the problems of closed doors and constant defeats, but despite all this I think we all basically know that we want to be men, we want to be people judged not by the color of our skin, but based on the content of our character, but now you know a lot of young black people don't want anything that smells like the white American middle class, but they want something that smells like whatever the black middle class is or they just don't want bourgeois values ​​which, after all, are the basis of this democracy .

Well, I guess we have to see what they say. I would be the first to agree that integration does not mean giving up everything that has an African American background, so to speak. I believe that there are certain unique things within any culture and certain cultural patterns that, when it comes to the process of fusion, can really elevate the entire culture and it seems to me that integration at its finest is the opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity. The other thing we have to see is that these young people are saying that there must be a revolution of values ​​in our country, as Jimmy Baldwin once said, what is the advantage of being integrated into a house on fire and I feel that a revolution of values ​​is necessary in the United States.

United because some of the values ​​that currently exist are certainly not in line with the values ​​and idealistic structure that gave rise to our nation. Unfortunately, we have not been true to these own ideals and many of the values ​​of the so-called white middle-class scientific society, values ​​that need to be reviewed and re-evaluated and, in a real sense, need to be changed, so I think that The young people in the black community who were raising these questions are raising some very deep questions about our total society, in other words, they are saying that there must be a restructuring of the architecture of our society when it comes to values ​​and with this I agree. agreement, so in the pursuit of integration I believe that we can offer our entire nation something because there are three evils in our nation, not only racism but the economic exploitation of poverty would be one of them and then militarism and I believe that in a sense and in a very real sense these three are inextricably linked and we're not going to get rid of one without getting rid of the other we, you stood at the Lincoln Memorial that August day in '63 and you said, "I had a dream." Did that dream imagine you could see a war in Asia preventing the federal government from doing the unnecessary? society is doing for black people what you think had to be done no, I did not imagine it so I must confess that that period was a great period of hope for me and I am sure that for many others throughout the country, many of the Blacks who had almost given up hope saw a solid decade of progress in the South and in 1954, that is, six to four, nineteen, six to three, nine years after the Supreme Court's decision to participate in the march on Washington , it meant a lot to them. a climactic moment a great decisive moment but I must confess that the dream I had that day has many points turned into a nightmare now I am not one of those who lose hope I am still waiting I still have faith in the future but I have had to analyze many things in the last few years and I would say that in the last few

months

I have passed through many souls in dying moments and I have come to see that we have many more difficult days ahead of us and some of the old optimism was a little superficial and must now be tempered with solid realism and I think the realistic fact is that we still have a long way to go and that we are involved in a war on Asian soil that, if not, checked, stopped and paused in the very soul of our nation dr.

King, even if there hadn't been a war in Asia, wouldn't you have had this nightmare to the extent that the black equality movement touched on two things that the white community holds sacred, their children and property? Oh, I have no doubt we would. We would have encountered great difficulties, great problems of resistance if the war had not existed, so I am not going to say that all our problems will be solved when the Vietnam War is over, but I am saying that the wall does. It is infinitely more difficult to deal with these problems when a nation becomes obsessed with weapons of war, loses its social perspective, and social improvement programs suffer.

This is just a fact of history, which is why we faced many more difficulties as a result of the war. It's much harder to really raise awareness during a wartime notice the other day, a few weeks ago, a black man was shot and killed in Chicago and it was a clear case of police brutality that was on page 30 of the

news

paper but on the page one at the top was 708, one Viet Cong death, that is something in a war like this that makes people callous, dulls conscience, strengthens the forces of reaction and generates bitterness, hatred and violence and strengthens the military complex -industrial of our country. and it has made our job much more difficult because I think we can accept some programs if we didn't have this war on our hands that would make people adapt to new developments just like they did in the south, they said they would never travel in bus with us, blood would flow in the streets, they wouldn't go to school and all that stuff, but when people realized that they had to do it because the law insisted, they finally adapted and I think white people everywhere this The country will adjust once the nation makes it clear that in schools and housing we have to learn to live together as brothers.

I think the biggest problem now is that we got our achievements over the last 12 years at bargain prices, so to speak. It cost the nation nothing, in fact, it helped the economic side of the nation integrate lunch counters and public accommodations, it cost the nation nothing to get the right to vote established and now we face problems that we don't can be resolved without a cost. the nation has received billions of dollars now. I think this is where we are getting our most resistance. They can put it into a lot of other things, but we can't get rid of slums and poverty without a cost in donations.

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