Feb. 8, 2021 - Epoch Times
12:44
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| We just celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King, and I wonder what he would be thinking if he were here today. | |
| In that connection, I recently re-read his letter from a Birmingham jail, which he wrote in 1963. | |
| The letter was written to fellow clergymen, many of whom were white, moderates, who didn't want him in Birmingham because they felt, well, he was kind of an outside agitator, and yeah, we agree with the goals of the Civil Rights Movement, but maybe now isn't quite the time. | |
| So MLK wrote this to fellow pastors, and here's what he said. | |
| Perhaps it is easier for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, wait, but when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim, When you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, | |
| kick, even kill your black brothers and sisters, when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society, when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park That has just been advertised on television. | |
| And see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that fun town is closed to colored children. | |
| And see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky. | |
| And see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness towards white people. | |
| When you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking, Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean? | |
| When you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you. | |
| When you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs of reading white and colored, when your first name becomes, and your middle name becomes boy, however old you are, and your last name becomes John, and your wife and mother are never given their respected title Mrs., | |
| When you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments, when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness, then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait." In the 80s, I lived in Cleveland. | |
| That's the city where Carl Stokes became the first black mayor of a major American city. | |
| He and Martin Luther King were very close friends. | |
| They marched together. | |
| They socialized. | |
| He knew him very well. | |
| And I asked Mr. | |
| Stokes what Martin Luther King would say if he were here today. | |
| Again, this is in the 80s. | |
| And Stokes said he would be blown away by the progress blacks have made. | |
| He said, Larry, do you know Reginald Lewis? | |
| I said the basketball player or the entrepreneur? | |
| Pioneers. | |
| Reginald F. Lewis and the making of a billion dollar empire. | |
| He was a local paperboy who became a Wall Street tycoon. | |
| The thing that I'm mad about Reginald Lewis, he was a take-charge kind of a guy. | |
| Breaking racial barriers in the corporate world. | |
| Reg Lewis, in many ways, was the Jackie Robinson of business. | |
| He bought a global conglomerate, 64 companies across 31 countries. | |
| No African American has done ever a big deal like that. | |
| Reginald F. Lewis, pioneer. | |
| Again, this is in the 80s. | |
| Reginald Lewis became the first black man to own and run a company of $1 billion in sales. | |
| And Carl Stokes said if MLK were here, that would blow him away. | |
| And remember, Martin Luther King basically predicted that in about 40 years time, when he gave an interview in 1966, there would be a black president. | |
| Frankly, I have seen certain changes in the United States over the last two years that surprise me. | |
| I've seen levels of compliance with the Civil Rights Bill and changes that have been most surprising. | |
| So on the basis of this, I think we may be able to get a Negro president in less than 40 years. | |
| I would think that this could come in 25 years or less. | |
| Now, the same year that Martin Luther King wrote the letter to the Birmingham Jail in 1963, there was a series in Ebony Magazine, Ebony Magazine, the largest black publication. | |
| The series was called, If I Were Young Today, where a bunch of high achievers were asked, what kind of advice would you give young people today? | |
| Do you know Paul Williams, the so-called architect to the stars? | |
| Paul Revere Williams was the first black American certified architect west of the Mississippi. | |
| He became a certified architect in 1921 and was the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects. | |
| At age 25, he won an architectural competition and, three years later, opened his own office in Los Angeles, California. | |
| He became well known as an outstanding draftsman and perfected the skill of rendering drawings upside down. | |
| He developed this unusual talent so his white clients, who might feel uncomfortable sitting next to a black architect, could see the drawings right side up across the table from him. | |
| During his career, he designed many public and private buildings. | |
| In the Hollywood Hills and the Wilshire section of Los Angeles, he designed more than 2,000 private homes. | |
| In addition to his own home in Lafayette Square, part of Los Angeles' historic West Adams, he designed the homes of numerous celebrities, including Frank Sinatra, Charles Carell, Lon Chaney, and Lucille Ball. | |
| Reportedly, architect A. Quincy Jones collaborated with Mr. | |
| Williams on Palm Springs projects in the mid-1940s. | |
| Together, they designed the upscale Palm Springs Tennis Club and two ritzy restaurants, The Town and Country and Romanoff's on the Rocks. | |
| Here's the advice Mr. | |
| Williams gave in 1963. | |
| Whatever one does as a profession or livelihood, he should endeavor to read the current magazines pertaining to his work. | |
| One must keep pace with progress and what the other fellow is thinking and doing. | |
| In order to do this, he must read, read, read. | |
| He should strive to become a specialist and not just another architect, engineer, or salesman." And do you know A. Philip Randolph, the union leader who organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, of which my father was a member? | |
| I think one of the individuals that in some ways encapsulates as much of the full range of political organizing in Harlem over many decades of the 20th century would be A. Philip Randolph. | |
| Here's a man who comes into the fullness of his calling first as a socialist. | |
| He is the co-editor of a magazine called The Messenger, advocating for taking down capitalism as really the only true road to racial equality, which eventually leads him to union organizing. | |
| And so he found the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids. | |
| The and maids gets dropped off over time, but initially it really was a mass labor movement organized around increasing wages and benefits for black porters and maids on Pullman cars, which traveled all around the country. | |
| A. Philip Randolph also is the broker of the March on Washington movement, which is a threat posed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to integrate the defense industries that were taking advantage of black migrants coming out of the South in response to the opportunities which is a threat posed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to integrate the defense industries | |
| And so with the threat of 100,000 black people marching on Washington in 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt preemptively signs Executive Order 8802, the Fair Employment Practices Commission. | |
| Randolph eventually supports Martin Luther King, the young Baptist preacher in the mid-1950s, and ultimately leads to being the lead planner of the March on Washington in 1963. | |
| And the advice Mr. | |
| Randolph gave in 1963? | |
| Negro youth must offer the future the same things that white youth offer, and they must have the faith that there is no basic racial difference in potential for achievement, moral, intellectual or spiritual. | |
| The future holds great opportunities for those who are prepared to meet and face the challenge of this age of science, technology and industrialism and social, economic and political change. | |
| End of quote. | |
| Herman Moore was a federal district judge. | |
| Here is the advice he gave black youth in 1963. | |
| Broader opportunities are opening today for Negro youth in fields which had been previously closed to them, such as engineering and science. | |
| There are also wider opportunities to become lawyers, diplomats, judges, economists, organization leaders. | |
| Negroes have greater chances at apprenticeships in the skilled trades as well, At the same time, the young Negro must prepare himself to be part of an expanding world and by accomplishment to lead in its expanding progress. | |
| Performance is the key." Notice anything missing from the advice these three gentlemen gave? | |
| Nobody said, the man is going to hold you back. | |
| They're aware of the situation. | |
| But they still say we have an obligation to try to overcome and persevere despite these horrific obstacles. | |
| Now, again, MLK said maybe in about 40 years' time we could have a black president. | |
| He didn't say in 40 years' time there'll be a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, which of course has happened many times. | |
| He didn't say there'll be a president of an Ivy League university, which has happened. | |
| He didn't say there's going to be a coach of one of the most storied football franchises in the country, Notre Dame, which has happened. | |
| He didn't say there are going to be blacks who are mayors of all the major American cities, New York, Chicago, LA, Philadelphia, Houston, Dallas, which has happened. | |
| No, he said in 40 years time there could be a black president. | |
| Speaking of whom? | |
| If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born and you didn't know ahead of time who you were going to be, what nationality, what gender, what race, Whether you'd be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you'd be born into, you wouldn't choose 100 years ago. | |
| You wouldn't choose the 50s or the 60s or the 70s. | |
| You'd choose right now. | |
| If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberg, young, gifted, and black in America, you would choose right now. | |
| Finally, in 1997, Time-CNN surveyed black teens and white teens and asked them whether or not they thought racism was a major problem in America. | |
| Not too surprisingly, both of them said yes. | |
| But then the black teens were asked the following question. | |
| Is racism a big problem, a small problem, or no problem in your own daily life? | |
| Guess what? | |
| 89% of them, 1997, 23 years ago, said racism was a small problem or no problem in my own daily life. | |
| In fact, more black teens than white teens said failure to take advantage of available opportunities is a bigger problem than racism. | |
| I'm Larry Elder, and we've got a country to save. |
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