It is not easy to paraphrase scholarly writing.
Dr. King read history (and literature and theology). He read the work of U.S. Southern historian C.
Vann Woodward. Woodward discovered that,
in the early 1900s, U. S. employers sought to keep wages low, so they conspired
to split and kill the budding labor movement.
They pitted White workers against Black workers. To do so, they insinuated Jim Crow laws into
much of America, encouraging American to believe lies about Black people. Woodward documented his discoveries
in the 1955 book The Strange Career of
Jim Crow.
Now, not every American will read a history book.
It is not easy to paraphrase historical facts so everyone
understands them. It takes a scholar-storyteller
and a crafter of word images—a Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Below is an excerpt from Dr. King’s address at the conclusion of the Selma March. Can you
find the imagery he used?
Toward the end of the Reconstruction era, something very significant happened. (Listen to him) That is what was known as the Populist Movement. (Speak, sir) The leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses (Yes, sir) and the former Negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests. Not only that, but they began uniting the Negro and white masses (Yeah) into a voting bloc that threatened to drive the Bourbon interests from the command posts of political power in the South.
To meet this threat, the southern aristocracy began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society. (Right) I want you to follow me through here because this is very important to see the roots of racism and the denial of the right to vote. Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, (Yes) thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. (Yes, sir) And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.
…And when [the White worker’s] 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)
Our advertisers know that “stories sell product.”
Do our peacemakers know that stories and images can open
eyes?
