"POVERTY,"

THE "N-WORD," "AFFIRMATIVE ACTION"

AND "REPARATIONS"?

Photograph copyright © 1965 by Stan Daniels, Editor,

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Don't argue and guess. Check out his own words!

On January 11, 1968 Dr Martin Luther King, Jr spoke at Ohio Northern University.

In that address he dealt with several concerns that are still current and highly relevant.

An excerpt from that message follows.

Now there's another myth that I want to mention, because if we are going to have action programs that will prod the forces in power so that they will make the necessary concessions, we are going to have to understand why the forces in power need to be prodded. Now this leads me to say that we've got to get rid of the myth of over-exaggerating the bootstrap philosophy. By that I simply mean this: Over and over again we hear that the Negro should lift himself by his own bootstraps. Then there are those who say over and over again, "Other ethnic groups did it; why don't you?" Now it doesn't help the Negro for unfeeling and insensitive people to say to him that he's been in this country more than 348 years and was brought here in chains, involuntarily, and yet people who have been here, other ethnic groups who have been here for a hundred or a hundred and fifty years have gotten ahead of him. That doesn't help him at all. That only deepens his problem, his frustration, and almost his self- hatred. For the people who are that insensitive never stop to recognize the fact that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil.

They never stop to recognize the fact that the nation made the Negro's color a stigma. It became something evil. You know even linguistics or semantics conspired against us on this. If you open Roget's Thesaurus, you'll find 120 synonyms for black. They are all degrading; smutty, dirty, lowly, every one of them. Now when you look for the 130 synonyms in that thesaurus for white, all of them [are] chaste, pure, everything elevated, and high and noble. So the society through its language structure came to the point of saying that a white lie is better than a black lie. If someone goes wrong in the family, you don't call them a white sheep, it's the black sheep of the family. If you know something about somebody, and you use that as a basis to bribe them and say that if you don't give them this amount of money that you are going to expose them you don't call that whitemail you call it blackmail. Go right down the language structure, and you see that everything conspired to make the Negro think that there was something wrong with him because of his color.

The other thing is that no ethnic group has lifted itself by its own bootstraps. The Negro was freed from the bondage of physical slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but he wasn't given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a man in jail for many, many years, and then suddenly discovering that he is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. Then you go to the man and say, "Now you're free," but you don't give him any bus fare to get to town. You don't give him any money to get clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet in life again. Every system of justice or code of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet this is exactly what America did to the black man. It freed him from slavery and then left him there penniless, illiterate. He didn't have a thing, and there was no land provided.

The important thing that America must realize is this: That at the same time that she refused to give the black man anything, she was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest through an act of Congress. Not only did she give the land, she built land grant colleges to teach them to farm. She provided county agents to help them and to get them expert, to give them expertise in farming. But not only that, the nation provided low interest rates in later years so that they could mechanize their farms. Not only that, many of these persons are being paid today not to farm, and these are many of the persons who are telling the Negro that he should lift himself by his own bootstraps. A wonderful thing. (applause) I guess that it is all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. Through centuries of denial, centuries of neglect, and centuries of injustice many, many Negroes have been left bootless. This does not mean that we do nothing for ourselves. It does not mean that we should not amass our economic and political resources to reach our legitimate goals. It simply means recognizing, the nation recognizing, that it owes a great debt on the basis of the injustices of the past.

You may read the
complete transcript
of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Presentation and

More coverage of Dr King's historic visit

to Ohio Northern is available on the University's Web site. 

Another Call to Conscience:
A Landmark Speech of
Martin Luther King, Jr.

Speech at the Great March on Detroit
23 June 1963
Detroit, Mich. 

Another Call to Conscience:
A Landmark Speech of
Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Quest for Peace and Justice
Nobel Lecture
Martin Luther King
December 11, 1964
The Nobel Peace Prize 1964. 

For more information about the work of Dr King,
please visit

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project

and

The King Center

and

The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial

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Please Visit these related pages // YOU CAN BE GREAT // Coretta Scott King // Martin Luther King, Jr // MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR and CONTEMPORARY ISSUES // ROUGH Side of the Mountaintop Speech // KEYS TO PEACE // Coretta Scott King Eulogy

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