On MLK Day, I always share this. Want people to know this as well as the “I Have A Dream” speech. Speechless at his wisdom and truth. "No other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. And then color became a stigma." Transcribed remainder below.
“America freed slaves in 1863, but gave them no land or nothing to get started on. Emancipation for the negro was really freedom to hunger. Freedom to the winds & rains of heaven. Freedom w/o food to eat or land to cultivate. Therefore it was freedom & famine at the same time.”
"When white Americans tell the negro to lift himself up by his bootstraps, they don’t look at the legacy of slavery & segregation. We ought to do all we can to lift ourselves up, but it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man he ought to lift himself up by his own bootstraps.”
“And many Negros by the thousands and millions have been left bootless by all these years of oppression and as a result of a society that deliberately made his color a stigma and something worthless and degrading.”
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