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bjbj Lecture #16 In 1960 America stood at the apex of its moral authority that magnificent
inaugural address by John Kennedy. But the speech brings tears to my eyes, above all
when I read it as I stand by the grave of John Kennedy. However, read it carefully.
America is prepared to bear any burden and pay any price to ensure the survival and success
of freedom. President Kennedy speaks to our old allies of Europe with which we share so
many cultural ties. He speaks to the nations of South America promising a new alliance
to work together for progress. He speaks to the emerging nations of Asia and Africa. He
wants to reach into every hut and every village in the world to bring democracy and prosperity.
There is not a single word about ten percent of the American population our African American
population. They are totally omitted from this speech, from these promises. Now it could
not be that Kennedy was unaware that stirring deeply within the African American community
were feelings of the deepest injustice. The name we use today African American was not
freely used. In those days still one of the polite terms was colored, *** which was
the term most often used by Martin Luther King black. But whatever the term these Americans
were not there. Now they had shed their blood in World War I. In fact, they had won their
freedom on the field of battles of the Civil War. They had been with Teddy Roosevelt up
San Juan Hill. They had shed their blood on the western front. Some of the earliest American
troops to go into action in World War I were the Harlem Hellcats. It was said that when
the French government tried to offer them the Croix De Guerre Woodrow Wilson sought
to block it. Well the French assembly answered, We believe in the universal rights of men
and they had fought the battlefields of World War II. In fact, the first integration of
the United States army actually came under General Patton during the Battle of the Bulge
when he put rifles into the hands of every soldier in his command and had them fight
side by side. So they had fought for this country. They had bled for this country. And
yet, they were omitted. They were omitted left out. Now already in 1955 one of the greatest
figures in American history Martin Luther King had come to the attention of the nation
for leading a boycott in Birmingham Alabama. Most of you fortunately can no longer remember
those days but all through the south white toilets, colored toilets, white schools, colored
schools, white drinking fountains, colored drinking fountains. An African American could
drive wearily for hours only to find himself in a town where he could not stay at any hotel.
He would simply have to with his family sleep in his car. Now his money was good but he
could not take them into a diner or a restaurant and buy them something to eat. He would have
to go around to the back door and once again, eat in his car. That was a second class, degrading
existence and it wasn t just in the south. Cities like Boston were racist. Already in
the 1930s the great African American Olympic champion, Owens, came back from Berlin and
he was asked, What did you think about Hitler s racial laws? and he said, I don t know anything
about politics but in Berlin, when I got on the streetcar I got in by the front door and
sat in the front seat. When I came back to Cleveland I was ordered to the back door and
had to sit in the back seat no matter how many Olympic medals I had won. Well, it was
an evil system and it was enforced with great brutality. Now the 13th and 14th and 15th
amendments passed after the Civil War had been seen and envisioned by the great Lincoln
as bringing equality to the African American, ending slavery, ensuring that every citizen
of the United States had an equal right to life, liberty and property and giving to the
African American male the right to vote. Well, in one of the most sordid political deals
in this country s history those rights were stripped away. Oh, slavery wasn t reinstituted
but the African American was reduced in the south to a status not far beyond it by being
a tenant farmer completely at the mercy of a new form of white master. See, in 1876 there
was a disputed election and it was thrown into a Congressional committee and the deal
was made that Rutherford B. Hayes the Republican would be named President of the United States
but in return the federal troops that had been occupying the south, in many cases trying
to ensure the right to vote for African Americans, their right to hold public office they would
be withdrawn and the south reverted reverted to a system of denying by chicanery the vote
to the African American, making sure they held no public office and if they got out
of line from the white perspective they were lynched in the most brutal fashion, subjected
to every form of brutality and this went right on up until 1960 beatings in jail, charged
with false crimes. And nowhere does Kennedy mention them. But in 1955, fresh with his
PhD from Boston University, Martin Luther King set out to change things. His name had
originally been Michael like his father, a minister. But the father had changed both
their names in a very symbolic act. As Martin Luther stood up against a corrupt establishment
so Martin Luther King Jr. would feel compelled to stand up against a corrupt establishment
stand up not with violence for there were many African Americans calling for violence
but by moral conscience, by the freedom of your conscience, by appealing to what was
best in Americans their conscience. His great hero was Gandhi of India, who by nonviolent
resistance not passive resistance. As Gandhi was quick to emphasize there was nothing passive
about his resistance but by nonviolent resistance had brought down the great British Empire,
wading into ranks of British policemen bashing in their heads and shaming Britain before
the world. So Gandhi was the hero of Martin Luther King and today in his magnificent museum
in Atlanta there is a statue of the great Gandhi, the great soul. And so he began in
1955 a boycott in Montgomery Alabama, the seat of the first government of the southern
Confederacy. Well, the merchants of Montgomery seemed willing enough to accept our money.
The bus company will allow us to ride on its buses and pay full fare but make us sit in
the back. We ll boycott those buses. We ll boycott those businesses. ll get lynched!
his father warned him. Maybe I will but I feel called by God to do this. And throughout
his bold and brave life King had a deep sense of a calling and a mission from God to bring
true freedom to this country. Well, the boycott turned out to be more successful than King
had hoped. The African Americans maintained it. They would walk to work. They would come
in mule carts but they wouldn t ride those buses. And thus by 1960 the Civil Rights Movement
was in full swing and it struck a chord with those young, idealistic Americans white and
African American alike and thus the Summer of 1961 they began to travel through the south.
They began to demand registration for African Americans to vote. They would sit side by
side in diners daring the police to come in and arrest them and the police were only too
willing to do so with a strong use of their batons, beating these demonstrators or as
they were called in the south, outside agitators Communist agitators. And indeed, the Civil
Rights Movement was seen as a Communist conspiracy and King himself was branded as a Communist.
Pretty early on in his career the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, began to keep a dossier on
him, to wiretap into his telephones trying to prove that he was a Communist. No he was
an American who believed in freedom. Kennedy didn t know what to do with this. He was worried
about carrying the south and he was afraid he might lose the next election if he stood
too strongly behind this Civil Rights Movement. King met with Kennedy on more than one occasion.
He was not especially impressed with Kennedy s commitment to the Civil Rights Movement.
And then on the sweltering August day in 1963 King led one of the greatest marches, one
of the greatest demonstrations in American history, right in the shadow of the Lincoln
Memorial and called out in one of the grandest orations in American history for he was the
most powerful speaker in American history. It was a remarkable combination. He was a
minister and he spoke in the tones of a minister. He spoke in the tones of a black minister
and the tones of a revival. But it was mixed with airy addition. He had written a letter
from a Birmingham jail to well meaning white ministers calling upon him to go cautiously.
I am telling them quoting from Paul, from Cicero, from St. Thomas Aquinas reminding
them about natural law. And he took us in this August speech, this sweltering Summer
of the Negros discontent right out of Richard III. He reminded us that we were founded on
the principles that All men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with
the unalienable right of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We are still
waiting for that to be granted to us. It was a promissory note in 1776. It cannot be any
longer a promissory note. We want it now. We want freedom to ring throughout this land
and do not think you can wait. I call for a peaceful change to this segregation but
there are many who will come after me who will use violence to bring it to an end. And
the heart of a nation was moved. And the movement only gained strength after the assassination
of Kennedy and the Presidency was taken up by Lyndon Johnson a Texan but he would do
more than any other white to achieve this equality, culminating in the passage of the
Civil Rights Act, Johnson himself using King s words the words of an old *** spiritual
We shall overcome. In fact, King had met with Johnson and he came out of the meeting and
said, You know, that damned cracker Johnson is going to do more for us than John Kennedy
ever would have. Well the wiretaps continued and King, having achieved this great goal,
began to move on. He began to question the war in Vietnam. Why are we fighting a war
thousands of miles away to bring our democracy to another people? Let us achieve it here
in our country first. How is this a war any different from a colonial war by the British,
a war of imperialism by the French? Why are African American men and poor white men why
are they the ones fighting this war and dying? Where is the cause for it? You can never achieve
by force true freedom. Well now, wait a minute he was getting out of line for Johnson oh
no, we can t have that. ve done all of this for the African American. How dare they question
my foreign policy? But then King went on and questioned You have seen the African American
gain his freedom to vote, an ending to segregation but that will all be meaningless if that African
American cannot feed his family or her family. Our wages are far below those of whites. Our
opportunities for jobs are far below those of whites. This economic system is as corrupt
and unjust as segregation itself. Thus he took up the cause of the poor like the garbage
collectors in Memphis and he marched with them. When he was at Memphis, early April,
he was so tired and worn out, so weary of giving speech after speech after speech but
he was going to be introduced that night. All he wanted to do was stand up, take some
applause but the crowd wouldn t have it. They had to have a speech. And there on the spot
he gave one of the most brilliant and moving of all of his speeches with its premonition
that he would die die early. I may not get to the promised land, he said. But we as a
people will get there. And on April the 4th 1968 he was shot dead by a still unknown assassin.
But he had achieved for freedom in this country as much as I dare say so the founders or Abraham
Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt by sheer force of conscience and by appealing to what was
best in the Americans. The war in Vietnam it was reaching its height in 1968 when King
was assassinated. I am often asked, How did we get into a war in Vietnam this war that
King opposed? Well, it was a very natural development. We were the bastion of freedom.
King reminded us that we must be a bastion of freedom at home as well as abroad but we
were the bastion of freedom abroad. We had entered into these treaty arrangements NATO
to protect Europe and the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization to protect the countries
of Southeast Asia from a Communist takeover, from a takeover by China. And in fulfillment
of that pledge already under President Kennedy we had begun to send in troops, first as advisors
into Vietnam and then under President Johnson more and more troops until an enormous American
military presence was established. It was guided by the use of history by historical
thought and as Winston Churchill said, History can be an impediment as well as a guide. Sometimes
history can lead you astray and men like George Marshal, men like Lyndon Johnson they were
guided by the world as it had been seen in the 1930s in retrospect. That world that had
former Britain and France appeased Hitler, allowed him step by step to spread his evil
totalitarian government. We were determined not to allow that to happen again. The Berlin
Wall that was seen as one such step, one such appeasement. And now Korea that was another
such step by the Communists and appeased in the form that we made a stalemate. And now
by 1964 Vietnam another bold step by China, using its proxy North Vietnam, to take over
South Vietnam. And if South Vietnam were allowed to fall then the whole of Southeast Asia would
fall Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia all of these would become Communist. So we had to
stop it there or we would end up fighting the Communists the Chinese in San Francisco.
And once we were in the war it proved very difficult to get out. How could President
Johnson withdraw the forces without victory? But victory was so elusive. We found ourselves
fighting a colonial war like the French before us in Indochina. We were not wanted there.
It s a lesson we still can t learn. Don t go where you re not wanted. The South Vietnamese
did not want us there. We were there supporting a corrupt government. Much of the aid that
we poured in went into the pocket of corrupt generals and politicians. The North Vietnamese
were brave and bold. They had a great deal of support in the villages and towns and cities
of Vietnam. They were willing to die for their ideals. The South Vietnamese did not feel
that way. This soon became America s war. And then bloody battles their names ominously
reminiscent of World War I and II places like Hamburger Hill became slaughter grounds for
American boys, up and down that same bloody hill. But this time, unlike World War I and
II, the press was not on their side. Very early on the press began to see this as a
war gone terribly wrong. Began to count up the enemy losses, the body count and some
journalist and even politicians came to understand that these figures sent out by the United
States military were grossly inflated. If you took them at face value the United States
had probably killed the population of North Vietnam the whole population three times over.
But nuclear weapons were not a possibility. Indeed, there was no front line in this war.
Endless forays into the jungle endless losses until finally 56,000 Americans would die.
And those who came back home, unlike World War I, unlike World War II, did not have victory
parades down Main Street. No they came home alone. They wore their uniforms. They were
spat upon, their memory disgraced. They had died just as surely for their country as any
other American soldiers but to me, today there is no more somber monument in Washington no
sadder monument than that simple black graven stone with the name of all those brave Americans.
Thus the war in Vietnam by 1968 had the American people bitterly divided. If you even questioned
the war you were a Communist sympathizer, the press openly attacking the President and
his war policies and calling for an end to the war. The war seemed unwinnable but more
and more troops kept pouring in. That war in Vietnam that would erode forever the moral
authority of the United States erode forever the ideal of the United States as a bastion
of freedom. Was it not just as the Communists said one more imperialistic power determined
to force capitalism and all of its worst excesses upon a colonial people, a people that only
wanted to be free and united? But at home it unleashed an avalanche of revolt against
moral authority. It unleashed a chaos such as America the John Kennedy of 1960 never
could have imagined and challenged the very concept of freedom as it had been founded
in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, challenged the very validity
of those ideas or at best saw them only as hypocrisy. Lecture #16 PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT
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