Why did you stop this audio People NEED TO HEAR the root cause of Americas racial divide. I am surprised that Sound Cloud has chosen to be silent during this critical time. !!!!! SMH!

"they revised the doctrine of white supremacy" says the transcript above. Surely "revised" should read "revived".

That was nice to hear. It would be nice to have a cleaned up version of it. I had to listen closely to follow his words. Someone who was even slightly hard of hearing wouldn't be able to understand it at all.

It would help to post a transcript beneath this. Hard to understand all the words.

Tremendously valuable, to have his words and voice. BTW, transcript is available above: click "Show more." For full speech (~30 min), go to http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_address_at_the_conclusion_of_selma_march/.

Same thing is happening today with "white privilege rhetoric" trying to divide people again.

i'm sad, i'm angry, i'm frustrated. where do you start?

Here, a clip rarely heard from MLK's speech at the Montgomery State Capitol after the March from Selma to Montgomery, in which he gives a historical lesson on how the races in America were kept divided after the Civl War. His efforts to reverse that division brought about his martyrdom on 4/4/68.

"...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. 

Thus, the threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and the white masses alike resulted in the establishment of a segregated society. They segregated southern money from the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; they segregated southern churches from Christianity; they segregated southern minds from honest thinking; and they segregated the Negro from everything. That’s what happened when the Negro and white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society: a society of justice where none would prey upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away; a society of brotherhood where every man would respect the dignity and worth of human personality."

RARE - MLK, Jr. on How The Races Were Kept From Unifying in Post-Civil War America

Featuring Janelle Monáe, Deep Cotton, St. Beauty, Jidenna, Roman GianArthur, and George 2.0.

RARE - MLK, Jr. on How The Races Were Kept From Unifying in Post-Civil War America

mipdo

Recent comments

Jeff White

Jumbo

Pjnarcisse

Kearroo

Related tracks