Speech by Martin Luther King, for the first time in Spanish: “They would like nothing more than to see us resort to violence”

ran 1957 and the racial segregation was still in force in the south of the UNITED STATES. At the same time that the country was proposing itself as the largest democracy in the world, the states that had joined the Confederation were banning people of African descent from entering restaurants, motels and hotels and even preventing them from entering parks and public libraries.

Electoral registers, on the other hand, use all sorts of devices to prevent the registration of the black population and their participation in the polls. “Ten years ago,” he pointed out Martin Luther King in ’67, not a single black had entered the legislative chambers of the South, except as a bellboy or as a chauffeur. Ten years ago, too many black people were still overwhelmed by day and ravaged by night a corrosive sense of fear and an incessant feeling of being nobody”.

These words are taken from his last speech as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a nonviolent direct action group he founded with other civil rights activists.

By the mid-1950s, after studying theology at Boston University and philosophy at Harvard, King had begun his career as a preacher at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where his oratorical skills quickly became famous and cross the city limits.

From there, he organized and led actions for the rights of Afro-descendants, such as the boycott of collectives, which began when a young black woman, Rosa Parksrefused to give up his seat to a white man, as racial segregation laws still required at the end of 1955. The action lasted 385 days during which no person of African descent used public transport.

Among 23 other writings, the speech quoted above is part of the anthology Martin Luther King Jr. Radical Texts and Speeches, a selection of sermons, lectures, and excerpts from the three political memoirs King published during his lifetime. Cornel West, professor at Harvard University and author of books such as Race Matters (1993) y black prophetic fire (2014), he arranged them for his original English edition (1994) and now they appear for the first time in Spanish translation as the third title in the “Thousand Lives” collection of the Tinta Limón editorial.

The volume organizes King’s writings into four parts, preceded by an introduction by West and some introductory words by the Argentine editor. In addition, at the beginning of each text, a short paragraph details the context of its production. The first of them, “The violence of desperate men”, deals with the boycott of collectives, which the author describes as “the chronicle of 50,000 Black people who took the principles of nonviolence seriouslywho learned to fight for their rights with the weapons of love and, in doing so, acquired a new appreciation of their human worth”.

The king drank Mahatma Gandhi the principles of nonviolent direct action, noting in a 1959 sermon – the second of the book’s radical texts – how “he succeeded in securing independence for his people from the British Empire without raising arms or swearing”. And when the African-American community, frustrated by the adverse circumstances it had faced for centuries, doubted these strategies, King insisted.

About march for freedom along the Mississippi in 1966, for example, he wrote that he “could imagine nothing less practical and more disastrous than the fact that, by misjudgment, one of us would precipitate a violent confrontation… We had neither the resources nor the techniques to win. Plus, I said, to many white people in Mississippi, government down, they would like nothing more than to see us resort to violence and have an excuse to get hundreds of black people in and out of the march.

Despite their stance against violence, the FBI and the US government They came to regard King as “the most dangerous man in America.”, perhaps due to his constant criticism and resistance to American empire, capitalism and xenophobia. The book reproduces his many arguments Against the Vietnam War and neocolonialism in Latin Americaagainst aside in South Africa, but also against poverty and for a fairer distribution of wealth in their own country and in the world.

It also includes a detailed article on Norman Thomas, six times candidate for the presidency of the United States for the Socialist Party of America, which he defines as “the bravest man I have ever known”. Originally published in 1964 on his 80th birthday, King must have missed the celebration, which coincided with his trip to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. His words underline (of Thomas) “the quest for racial and economic democracy in our country, and for sanity and peace in the world… With great admiration and indebtedness, I bring the inspiration of his life in Oslo,” he wrote.

The previous year, in its famous letter from birmingham jail, King called for obeying laws that are just, but not unjust. “An unjust law – he explained to distinguish the two – is a code that a more powerful or numerically majority group forces a minority to follow, but does not apply to itself. It is the difference made law. Likewise, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and is willing to apply to itself. It’s equality become law.”

And he kept on paraphrasing Saint Thomas Aquinas“Any law which elevates the human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation laws are unjust because segregation warps the soul and damages the personality. This gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.

King observed how “even semantics conspired to make black look ugly and demeaning”. He quoted the Roget’s thesauruswhere the synonyms for “black” always represent “something evil and degrading: soot, filth” as opposed to those for “white”: “pure, chaste… In our society, you know, a white lie is worth a little better than a black lie And therefore, if someone does something wrong in the family, it is not a white sheep, but a black sheep”.

King analyzed this way how language and culture have degraded the idea of ​​darkness “to make the black man feel like nobody, that he didn’t matter, to make him feel like he was on another level of humanity… The problem was that the nation had made its color a stigma.”

In 1967, many things were already different. The whole structure of segregation had been deeply shaken thanks to protests and activism. “It’s an achievement whose consequences are deeply felt by every black Southerner in their daily lives,” King said. At that time, he had just over seven months to live.

On April 3, 1968, the day before his assassination, King had traveled to Memphis to support a strike by sanitation workers. There he delivered one of his most prescient sermons to an overflowing crowd. He insisted on the principles of non-violence and also proposed “to always anchor our direct external action to the power of economic withdrawal. Now, we’re individually poor, we’re poor relative to white society in the United States… (But) Never stop remembering that… black people, collectively, are wealthier than most nations in the world. We have annual revenues of over thirty billion dollars a year, more than all exports from the United States and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know ? It’s power, if we know how to put it together.”

King dies at 39, but leaves behind a series of tools against discrimination and for the empowerment of minorities, designed for your community, but useful for any group that needs to claim their civil rights. In this sense, West’s selection aims to “keep alive the memory of Martin Luther King’s radical love and prophetic legacy”, beyond the watered-down image that usually spreads in open rivalry with the public figure of Malcolm X.

In its Spanish translation, this book opens the entrance to the the history of the United States through the flank of its political and social movements, while proposing to distinguish historical processes of racialization and local emancipation policies from those that took place after British colonialism. “Publishing King -says Tinta Limón- allows us to expand the archives of activism and militancy available to think politically.”

Continue reading: