January 18, 2016 By: Juanita Jean Herownself Category: Uncategorized
I was blessed to have a high school teacher at my all-white high school who assigned Dr. Martin Luther King’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail as a reading assignment. It was written in 1963 in the margins of newspapers while King was jailed.
That letter awoke defiance in me and it remains strong in my soul.
You might want to read it today. It is especially timely this year. Click here.
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My name is Susan DuQuesnay Bankston. I live in Richmond, Texas, in the heart of Tom DeLay's old district. It's nuttier than squirrel poop here.
I am honored and privileged to know Miss Juanita Jean Herownself, hairdresser extraordinary and political maven. Since she does not have time to fiddle with this internet stuff, I type her website for her and you can read it if you want to. If you don't, she truly does not give a big bear's butt.
A lot of what I post here has to do with local politics, but you probably have the same folks in your local government.
This ain't a blog. Blogs are way too trendy for me. This is a professional political organization.
Dr. King’s incredible patience and intelligence in explaining himself and his cause over and over to those who plainly did not want to hear or understand is clearly evident in all of his written and oral arguments for racial equality. What is so painful is the fact that this argument is still taking place, with the SCOTUS ruling gutting the Voting Rights Act and the thinly veiled RKlan push to make it much harder for minorities to vote. King’s dream is still a nightmare for so many people.
1Selecting the best MLK speech would be difficult. My favorite was his Beyond Vietnam speech from 1967.
http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_beyond_vietnam/
2It’s difficult to read MLK quotes in 2015 and get a sense of their size in 1963. NO ONE in 1963 could have foreseen a black POTUS, as the model for such then was old, white and male.
3Forgive me. I’ll write 2015 instead of 2016 for a while longer. Maybe July 31st or so.
4I was too young (in a white blue-collar neighborhood) to know much about King then, but I read his words later, including the Letter From Birmingham Jail. The civil rights movement started before he joined it, but he helped to lead it with nonviolence and dignity.
Still don’t like that statue in DC– I think he should have been striding forward, not standing with his arms crossed. But a good idea anyway.
And a small word for someone King influenced– LBJ’s speech to Congress on March 15, 1965, urging passage of the Voting Rights Act:
But even if we pass this bill the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.
And we shall overcome.
http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/johnson.htm
5This Gandhi quote fits in here, too:
6“If by renouncing the luxuries of life we can lighten the burdens of others, surely the simplification of our wants is a thing greatly to be desired!”
“Nonviolence is not a garment to be put on and off at will, it’s seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our very being” M. Gandhi
I am ashamed to admit I had never before read “A Letter From a Birmingham Jail”
7I was so lucky in September 1955 to walk into my high school English class and see a
Negro woman at the teacher’s desk.
When she gave our first assignment, I put my head down and said “I’m in trouble “. For the first time in school, I was going to have to think, and work.
“Describe a sunset ” and the learning of the next three years enabled me to get into the Air Force Academy and have a career in the Air Force.
Without the best educated teacher in the Elkins WV school system, who had been held back by the color of her skin until “Brown vs Board of Education “, I wonder what lesser person I would have become.
A Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written on the margins of a newspaper, is LONG. Amazing use of space! I am gobsmacked that at least high school juniors and seniors are not presented with this epistle. They would be bout the right age to read it and actually get something out of it. I e-mailed my grand-daughter today and asked her if she had ever heard of it. She is going on 17 in high school in Alabama.
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