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| Steps of State Capital Montgomery Ala March 25 1965 |
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
Exerpt of speech below
The ruling class in the Unites States is forced by the movements from below to recognize individual fighters for working class, racial and sexual freedom. Just the same way they pay lip service to unions, but they were forced to accept them. Unions were built through heroic sacrifice of working class people in the US. We were shot, deported, savaged, beaten but we won them. Everything we have the ruling class resists with violence.
Martin Luther king was murdered by the US state or government as some call it because of his politics, and I see both the King and Kennedy families are calling for further investigation in to their deaths. I am not equating Kennedy with King because Kennedy was a capitalist politician and firmly rooted in that class. King was not and he led a mass movement. Kennedy pressured King to break from some of those people that supported and helped him, white liberals and Radicals but he had nasty enemies among his own class, this does not justify his murder by the US government either.
I was about to attend a Martin Luther King celebration one time but I saw it was totally non-political yet King was in essence a political man, a radical. He was a threat because he explained what racism was and why it arose the way it did in the US and he did it publicly. We are taught in one way or another it is inherent in people, it is a part of white people’s genes for example. It’s human nature we are told or greed, and for the religious, Satan perhaps. King tore that nonsense down. Malcom X also was abandoning the nationalist view and arguing along similar lines. King opposed the Vietnam War and the ranks of the US military were beginning to crack. To hide this, they build a carnival like atmosphere around working class heroes to avoid any discussion of their ideas and what they actually stood for. Their media portrays the unions we built as being built by the Mafia and gangsters. Capitalist history is in essence white capitalist history. We must own our heroes and our own history.
Below, is part of a speech he gave on the steps of the Montgomery State Capital March 25th 1965. Read, show, sing it to young people if you like. The mass media no matter which source, is in essence “fake” news in the sense that it has a class bias. Here is a great, brief and true history lesson. He attacks a ruling class not the white workers, the white poor. It’s politics at its best. You can also listen to a rare speech on this same issue here. If it doesn't work try here. It's good stuff.
Montgomery Alabama March 25 1965
On our part we must pay our profound respects
to the white Americans who cherish their democratic traditions over the ugly
customs and privileges of generations and come forth boldly to join hands with
us. (Yes, sir) From Montgomery to Birmingham, (Yes, sir) from
Birmingham to Selma, (Yes, sir) from Selma back to Montgomery, (Yes)
a trail wound in a circle long and often bloody, yet it has become a highway up
from darkness. (Yes, sir) Alabama has tried to nurture and defend
evil, but evil is choking to death in the dusty roads and streets of this
state. (Yes, sir. Speak, sir) So I stand before you this afternoon (Speak,
sir. Well) with the conviction that segregation is on its deathbed in
Alabama, and the only thing uncertain about it is how costly the
segregationists and Wallace will make the funeral. (Go ahead. Yes, sir)
[Applause]
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. (Listen to him) That is what was
known as the Populist Movement. (Speak, sir) The leaders of this
movement began awakening the poor white masses (Yes, sir) 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 (Yeah) 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. (Right)
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, (Yes) 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. (Yes, sir)
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. (Yes, sir) He gave him Jim Crow. (Uh huh)
And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets
could not provide, (Yes, sir) 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. (Right sir) And he ate Jim Crow. (Uh
huh) 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. (Yes,
sir) And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, (Speak)
their last outpost of psychological oblivion. (Yes, sir)
Thus, the threat of the free exercise of the
ballot by the Negro and the white masses alike (Uh huh) resulted in
the establishment of a segregated society. They segregated southern money from
the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; (Yes,
sir) they segregated southern churches from Christianity (Yes, sir);
they segregated southern minds from honest thinking; (Yes, sir) and
they segregated the Negro from everything. (Yes, sir) 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 pray 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. (Yes, sir)
Source, Stanford University
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