January 15th is Martin Luther King day in America. I think that he deserves better. Like Rosa Parks he has become a safe symbol, of what was certainly not a safe movement, and he got more radical, not less, as he got older. I was glad to see Idiot/Savant giving voice to some of Martin Luther King’s more radical ideas.
But, as I’ve said before, I think it’s important to remember that the movement was much wider than one great orator.* So I’m not going to quote Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream Speech” – instead I’m going to write about another speech that was to have been given at the March on Washington.
John Lewis gave the speech for the Student Non-Violent Co-Ordinating Committee that day. He had written an angry speech, that criticised the governemnt, and didn’t preach patience. Other organisers put immense pressure on him to remove the more radical portions of his speech. He gave into that pressure, and the speech he gave is available here
This is the speech he was to have given:
We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of. For hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. They have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages—or no wages at all.
In good conscience, we cannot support the administration’s civil rights bill; for it is too little, and too late. There’s not one thing in the bill that will protect our people from police brutality.
This bill will not protect young children and old women from police dogs and fire hoses, for engaging in peaceful demonstrations. This bill will not protect the citizens in Danvllle, Virginia, who must live in constant fear in a police state. This bill will not protect the hundreds of people who have been arrested on trumped-up charges. What about the three young men in Americas, Georgia, who face the death penalty for engaging in peaceful protest?
The voting section of this bill will not help thousands of black citizens who want to vote. It will not help the citizens of Mississippi, of Alabama, and Georgia, who are qualified to vote, but lack a sixth grade education, ‘ One man, one vote’ is the African cry. It is ours, too. (It must be ours.)
People have been forced to leave their homes because they dared to exercise their right to resister to vote. What is in the bill that will protect the homeless and starving people of this nation? What is there in this bill to insure the equality of a maid who earns $5 a week in the home of a family whose income is $100,000 a year?
For the first time in 100 years this nation is being awakened to the fact that segregation is evil and that it must be destroyed in all forms. Your presence today proves that you have been aroused to the point of action.
We are now involved in a serious revolution. This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their career on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic and social exploitation. What political leader here can stand up and say ‘My party is the party of principles
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What is there in this bill to insure the equality of a maid who earns $5 a week in the home of a family whose income is $100,000 a year?
I wonder what this means. I can see that this kind of thing is a gross disparity. And it’s also the kind of thing that a minimum wage bill is supposed to address. I was alive then and worked for minimum wage. It was more than $5 a week. Was a maid at that time not included in the minimum wage law? Was the family in this case breaking the law and getting away with it due to racism, and is that what this author meant to address?
both the Democrats and the Republicans have betrayed the basic principles of the Declaration of Independence.
This, I regret very much to say, has the ring of truth to it. I suspect that this will come home hard in the next couple of years. I expect that the Democrats will do much the same as the Republicans did in their place; perhaps for different people, but the main business of government will still end up being redistributing money and power based on political expediency and advantage. In my judgement, despite the easy answer of the war, this is one reason why the Republicans lost their Congressional majority. Republicans ran on the grounds of minimizing governmental interference in private affairs, but once in power they failed to do so; they grabbed and stuffed pork into a different set of hands than the Democrats, but grab and stuff they did.
Well, there really isn’t much difference between people in both major political parties. They both engage in corruption, they occasionally get caught and embarassed, the public says, enough, votes the latest regime out and starts over. Are the people who we elect really representative of the people who they purportedly represent or are the people who could fill this role simply discouraged from running for a myriad of reasons or disenfranchised from the process?
Just watching the latest round of local elections, it’s costing more and more money to launch a successful campaign and elected officials are lining up and announcing endorsements of political candidates before they even officially file their intent to run. This smacks of cronyism and breeds further cynicism in the process even at its bottom in the cities, towns and counties which is where so many of the decisions are made that most directy impact people’s lives.
Sadly, I have to agree with Radfem. There really isn’t sufficient difference between the two parties to be worth much. And the influence of money corrupts everyone.
As for the $5/hour maid and the wealthy family, I think the point is that radical disparity in wealth – the kind of disparity which has been much on the increase – is not healthy for our society. I have absolutely no problem with the CEO of a major corporation making more money than the janitor, but how much more? It has gone way too far. This is a racial issue, but it is more than a racial issue, it impacts everyone.
Great speech. I wish the world it describes wasn’t so distant.
Then the question obtains why one needs huge sums of money to run a campaign. Could it be because most people won’t read news stories about a candidate and his or her opinions on the issues (which appear for free) and depend on political ads?
RonF,
It’s probably an issue of bounded rationatlity: We might THINK that people assess all available information, and make a rational choice…. but they don’t. In fact, most people assess only a very limited amount of information. they use that information 9as they assess it) to decide when to stop collecting information (which has a cost) and then they make their decision based no, usually, very limited quantities of information.
Ads and the like are efficient ways of communicating small quanta of limited information. That’s why they’re so effective. Of COURSE we could all learn a lot more by reading each candidate’s individually-authored platform, or by listening to a 4 hour Q&A for each candidate, but we don’t want to send the time. So we get limited information from ads (“OK, matches on abortion rights in general; seems nice; is the right race/gender, etc”) and act on it.
I fully realize that this is probably a hopeless cause, but I can’t help wondering where the hell the Democratic Party is. You know? Remember them? The party that used to be the champion of the labor unions? Of someone other than the Yale grads who seem to run the government these days?
Indeed they won the last election, but I fear that was more of an anti-Republican vote than a vote in favor of what the Democrats stand for, if only because no one can figure out what they stand for if anything.
I’ve not worked in political campaigns for people but have for ballot initiatives and the press can and will only do so much, so you have to use advertising in some sense and that costs money.
Campaign managers and treasurers are used more and more even on local campaigns and it’s usually a relatively few people who do this professionally and they may represent more than one political candidate although not in the same district race.
Newspaper ads and inserts are expensive. Television ads are, but they’re not really useful at the local level so that’s not an issue unless you go higher than that. Signs are expensive too, as are people who are paid to do phone banks and go door to door.
Most of campaigning is strategic(i.e. picking good representatives to do editorial board interviews for endorsements, debating at voting forums, etc. or even holding forums). A consistant hard effort through the election day is still most important but money matters too more and more.
Most of campaigning is strategic(i.e. picking good representatives to do editorial board interviews for endorsements, debating at voting forums, etc. or even holding forums).
I must say, though, that I despair of such efforts. How many people pay any attention to editorial endorsements or attend forums? It seems these days that the attack ad in a flyer or TV ad (local or national, respectively) is what people pay attention to. How many people actually read the editorial page these days?
… where the hell the Democratic Party is. You know? Remember them? The party that used to be the champion of the labor unions?
I’ve been paying attention to politics since the mid-60’s. My perspective is that the Democratic party has been trying to take up the causes of so many different groups that there doesn’t seem to be a central set of themes that all those groups can support. You ask about labor union support – hell, these days there are a lot of labor union members that are socially quite conservative. They’re not too comfortable mixing with the gay rights folks. And there are plenty of working people who are not all that thrilled with the open-border concept. The successes that the Republican party has had seem to me to be due to the fact that most of their message can be agreed upon by most of the party’s members. The war has made for a central issue that people can coalesce around for or against, but there’s really not much else there for the Democrats right now. And now that Speaker Pelosi has come out and said that there will be no one central position of the Democratic party about the war (other than “war is bad”, I suppose), I have to wonder what will happen in the next couple of years running up to the 2008 election?
Yale grads? The only difference is that Harvard grads used to run the Democratic party, and still have a pretty big influence.