TDIH: The culmination of the March for Selm to Montgomery

[AthenaAwakened]

A quote from Dr. King's "How long? Not long" speech given in front of the capital in Montgomery Alabama

If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. (Yes, sir) He gave him Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, (Yes, sir) he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man. (Right sir) And he ate Jim Crow. (Uh huh) And when his undernourished children cried out for the necessities that his low wages could not provide, he showed them the Jim Crow signs on the buses and in the stores, on the streets and in the public buildings. (Yes, sir) And his children, too, learned to feed upon Jim Crow, (Speak) their last outpost of psychological oblivion. (Yes, sir)

The law that was Jim Crow is gone (at least for most of us) but the psychoses remains. You find it in old guises and new. In the need for three strikes laws, the militarization of the police, the need for charter schools that demand uniform clothing, uniform behavior and uniform thought, the standardized testing that not only demands thinking inside the box but punishes student and teacher alike if one or the other should try to see what lies outside that box, in all these things and more we find not just a school to prison pipeline to black youth where they can be made to work for almost no wages but a school to wage slavery pipeline for white youth where $10 an hour is too much to make and benefits are for CEOs and those better than hillbillies, hicks, and poor white trash.


What so many didn't know back then and still don't know today is that Jim Crow wasn't just about keeping the black man in a ditch, but about convincing the masses of white men that in order to keep that black man there, it was those white men's duty to get down in that ditch with him.