If my last post quoted one of the main figures in the Civil Rights Movement, today I devote it to the other half of the struggle, Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. Yes, that “negro” who once frightened white America with just a dream actually said more than that. Anyway, below I leave a link to the speech just in case you want to listen to it, because –this is a personal thought- reading it it’s not enough, you have to listen and let him captivate you with his preaching voice.
Then I want you to spend half a minute reading this:
“For years the Negro has been taught that he is nobody, that his color is a sign of his biological depravity, that his being has been stamped with an indelible imprint of inferiority, that his whole history has been soiled with the filth of worthlessness. All too few people realize how slavery and racial segregation have scarred the soul and wounded the spirit of the black man.”
No more to explain. Just to remark the fact that some people(?) STILL think that black men and women are sexually depraved and physiologically inferior and use it as a shield for their discrimination. And again notice the word STILL, more than forty years later, and with a “mulatto” in the presidency of the most powerful nation. Well, apparently we are ruled by an animal…
But I don’t want to be angry, not today, so I’ll choose another quotation from the same speech:
“In this struggle for racial justice, the Negro must seek to transform his condition of powerlessness into CREATIVE and positive power.”
This could be a second introduction to the main theme of my blog: Black arts; not only verse (which personally I love, as you will see) but also music, film, TV, etc. Some can be seen as another brick in the path for equality or even just the contrary, for self-segregation, but others are just the proof that black and white art are, finally, nothing but plain ART.
Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJk
