8 - Conclusion
Summary
In a speech delivered in Nashville, Tennessee, on 27 December 1962, the orator, civil-rights leader and essayist Martin Luther King presented an eloquent defence of his philosophy of racial integration, as distinct from the legal and social processes of desegregation:
The problem of race and color prejudice remains America's greatest moral dilemma. When one considers the impact it has upon our nation, internally and externally, its resolution might well determine our destiny. History has thrust upon our generation an indescribably important task - to complete a process of democratization which our nation has too long developed too slowly, but which is our most powerful weapon for world respect and emulation. How we deal with this crucial situation will determine our moral health as individuals, our cultural health as a region, our political health as a nation, and our prestige as a leader of the free world. The shape of the world today does not afford us the luxury of an anemic democracy. The price that America must pay for the continued oppression of the Negro is the price of its own destruction. The hour is late; the clock of destiny is ticking out; we must act now before it is too late.
For King, therefore, time, or the clock of destiny, was to be measured against the urgent need to establish integration amongst blacks and whites, a condition necessary to what he perceived as ‘a recognition of the fact that a denial of freedom to an individual is a denial of life itself': ‘I may do well in a desegregated society but I can never know what my total capacity is until I live in an integrated society. I cannot be free until I have had the opportunity to fulfil my total capacity untrammeled [sic] by any artificial hindrance or barrier.’ King's demand for racial integration strategically acknowledged both the ‘solidarity of the human family’ and the pursuit of freedom as a fundamental prerequisite for choice, determination and responsibility. King defined the Civil Rights March on Washington in August 1963 as the ‘greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation’.
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- Caryl Phillips , pp. 83 - 84Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2004