Martin Luther King Jr. Speech

Martin Luther King Jr. Where Do We Go From Here?

Today, I was assigned to write a short paper on a primary source document in my political science class. It just so happens that I was assigned a piece of a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. The entire time that I read through his speech, I thought about our class and Kozol's speech from last Thursday night. The speech is called, where do we go from here? and was on August 16th, 1967 at the convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. I wish I could find a video of his speech because the entire duration of his presentation resonated with everything that we have been learning about in Dr. Bogad's class.

He made the statement, "Negroes are still impoverished aliens in an affluent society. They are too poor even to rise with the society, too impoverished by the ages to be able to ascent by using their own resources. And the Negro did not do this himself; it was done to him." This reminded me of Tim Wise's interview on the Ring of Fire where he claimed that blacks, hispanics, and other minorities continue to be segregated by lack of opportunity to things such as housing, employment, education, health care etc. We did not provide African Americans with equal opportunities in 1967 and sadly, we still do not today.

Martin Luther King went on to defend Johnson's theory by claiming that in order to move forward, it is necessary to understand where we currently stand. He stated "In order to answer the question, 'Where do we go from here?', which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now...In elementary schools, Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than the white schools. One-twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend college. Of employed Negroes, seventy-five percent hold menial jobs. This is where we are..." He pushes that we need to be honest with where we stand; that we can't be afraid to state our problems in order to fix them. This also shows that the Brown vs. the Board of Education was extremely necessary because the segregated schools were not providing equal treatment to the African American schools. Though we have grown from these numbers, we still have alarming statistics in relation to the difference of educated and employed African Americans vs. whites. Clearly, many changes still need to be made in order to have equality in the future.

Reading Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech reminded me a lot of Jonathan Kozol's speech. Miguel was right when he said in class today that they both speak about one cause. They are both so incredibly passionate about equality and speak in a way that is tremendously powerful. I am glad that I was assigned this particular primary source document in my political science class because it related extremely closely with everything that we have been learning.