Who is this "Martin Luther King" and why does he have his day off today?

[Ben Kenobi]

I never asked you to.

Tuberski, please understand.

By 'people', I didn't mean you.

[Alexander's Horse]

his speech was very preachy

[MichaeltheGreat]

Albie, I guess my question is this.

Would Americans be celebrating MLK Day if he wasn't black?

It's one thing to be ignorant. It's another to be patently offensive while doing it. Like DrStranglove and a few other older posters (I assume Doc was in the south the whole time?), I grew up in the mother****ing deep south in the civil rights era. I went to public schools in Houston which were white-only up until 19mother****ing70, 15 years after the final Brown v Board of Education case. Open racism in employment, housing, just about every facet of life. My dad worked on a lot of government projects, where by law they couldn't have segregated facilities, but the work around was to simply have two water coolers, two sets of bathrooms (even portacans on jobsites) without signs on 'em, and the "negroes" knew better than to go to the one by the construction trailers where the white bosses worked. Even if they had to go clear to the opposite end of the jobsite, they knew you didn't go to the white man's bathrooms or touch the handle on his water cooler. You might be trolling, or just clueless, but shut your ****ing mouth on this one. Some of us here saw a lot of it first hand. And what we saw and experienced was nothing like being born black and growing up in that atmosphere.

[MichaeltheGreat]

his speech was very preachy

He was a preacher. Pretty much the only profession where a black man of his era in the south could pursue post-high school education without being labeled "uppity." Being considered an "uppity" "nigra" could be very hazardous to one's health.

[Ben Kenobi]

It's one thing to be ignorant. It's another to be patently offensive while doing it. Like DrStranglove and a few other older posters (I assume Doc was in the south the whole time?), I grew up in the mother****ing deep south in the civil rights era. I went to public schools in Houston which were white-only up until 19mother****ing70, 15 years after the final Brown v Board of Education case. Open racism in employment, housing, just about every facet of life. My dad worked on a lot of government projects, where by law they couldn't have segregated facilities, but the work around was to simply have two water coolers, two sets of bathrooms (even portacans on jobsites) without signs on 'em, and the "negroes" knew better than to go to the one by the construction trailers where the white bosses worked. Even if they had to go clear to the opposite end of the jobsite, they knew you didn't go to the white man's bathrooms or touch the handle on his water cooler. You might be trolling, or just clueless, but shut your ****ing mouth on this one. Some of us here saw a lot of it first hand. And what we saw and experienced was nothing like being born black and growing up in that atmosphere.

I think I know a thing or too about exclusion, and about integration and how controversial that idea was at the time. Old enough to know that, seen it firsthand.

I think I know what it's like to be told to sit in the back of the bus - to get stared at by classmates who look at you as if you're the space alien from Mars.

Dr. King had a vision, you might want to ask what a little boy with big glasses and hearing aids has to think the first time he hears, "that speech", and knows that there's someone else out there who understands.

[DaShi]

You have no comparison. Plus, you're an awful human being who should do the world a favor and end yourself somehow.

[Al B. Sure!]

Inevitably, Ben will turn every talk of every struggle to a 'me' thread. I was surprised it took 80 posts before it went there.

[giblets]

No one on the internet needs to know you're partially deaf and you still come across like a Martian. Maybe it's not the disability that's causing people to reject you.

[Ben Kenobi]

People hate me here on Apolyton for who I am, and what I believe.

What was that you said, Tuberski?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Not according to the man himself. He himself says, that what is relevant is the character - not the colour of his skin. This is why people remember him, and why his day is celebrated. Dr. King insisted that just because White people were white wasn't an excuse - everyone had a duty and an obligation to stand up. You had to choose a side - "neutral" wasn't an option. You were either with King- or you were against him.

No, he said that he had a dream that one day that would become true - which was absolutely radical for the day, and not just in the south. One of the nicest and smartest guys I ever met when I was a kid was a man named Jim Sheppard. He had a master's degree in mechanical engineering, had a great interest in science and math and was a great practical science and mechanics teacher, though that wasn't what he did for a living - he was a nuclear engineer who worked with my dad in the south and elsewhere. When my dad was sent to troubleshoot projects, depending on where he would be sent, he was asked "are you going to try to take Shep with you?" - because there were lots of towns in and out of the south (some parts of the midwest were worse) where there were no hotels the corporate types could find that would let a room to a "colored." The man was brilliant, but to a whole huge swath of the population, he was just a dirty, good for nothin' ****** in a suit that he probably stole from a white man he mugged.

It has nothing to do with black people's day. We still have race issues in this country, and race is an antiquated, pseudoscience bull**** idea from the middle ages and prior anyway. It's a day to remember how far short of our ideals we were (and are), and to remind us of what we still have to achieve.

[Ben Kenobi]

It has nothing to do with black people's day.

Congratulations. You successfully understood the point I was trying to drive home.

We still have race issues in this country, and race is an antiquated, pseudoscience bull**** idea from the middle ages and prior anyway. It's a day to remember how far short of our ideals we were (and are), and to remind us of what we still have to achieve.

It's not *just* about black people. The idea is the idea. Arguing that it's only valid because of what Dr. King suffered confuses the message from the messenger. Don't you think it spoke volumes to you - that it wasn't coming from a black person, but a white person espoused same exact idea? Dr. King understood that - he knew he needed this issue to not be "let's give black people more stuff", but about how it was for people - all people. He didn't attack the symptoms, black people being poorer, but the source - that black people were somehow inferior and 'less than' white people. It's a bridge - Dr. King was on one end, but you can't build it on just one side. You need both. Sheppard on one side, and your dad on the other.

[Hauldren Collider]

He was a preacher. Pretty much the only profession where a black man of his era in the south could pursue post-high school education without being labeled "uppity." Being considered an "uppity" "nigra" could be very hazardous to one's health.

There were black lawyers and doctors....

[MichaeltheGreat]

I think I know a thing or too about exclusion, and about integration and how controversial that idea was at the time. Old enough to know that, seen it firsthand.

Sorry, but you don't. I'm not talking integration. Integration was the last step, when the de jure barriers had been removed, but the public and private de facto barriers remained. Bull Connor wasn't concerned about ******s and a bunch of outside agitatin' jews from up north riding on buses. He was concerned about the notion of maintaining control.

I think I know what it's like to be told to sit in the back of the bus - to get stared at by classmates who look at you as if you're the space alien from Mars.

Whatever you're talking about, is a little different. You might be judged by kids as the freak, but that's different than an established legal system that dictates, well before you were even a gleam in your daddy's eye, the upper limits of what you would become and how you would live your life.

Dr. King had a vision, you might want to ask what a little boy with big glasses and hearing aids has to think the first time he hears, "that speech", and knows that there's someone else out there who understands.

A different point. It might have been comforting to you, but little kids en masse are instinctively nasty little bastards. You might also have ignorant adults that decided a kid who couldn't see or hear so good might have to take shop classes, or whatever, but that's not the same as people driving through your neighborhood at night looking to see if you were out and about (undoubtedly to steal or have your way with a white woman), people deciding in advance where you couldn't live, what jobs you couldn't have, etc. Or making sure you didn't bother to show up and vote on election day. Or if you drove too new or too fancy of a car, if you didn't steal it, you were doin' something dirty to pay for it.

Or that as an adult, you had to call even white kids (assuming you had an acceptable reason to even talk to a white kid) by Mister or Miss and their last name, while (if they had a reason to deign to respond to you) they could call you boy or if they knew it, your first name. And if you didn't like that, you were uppity. Which on a good day might mean you only lost your job. As a kid, I nearly cost a black man a job simply by saying hello to him as I was walking by. Luckily my dad was a golf freak with a plus one handicap and we lived on a golf course. The black man who got canned was a groundskeeper's assistant, and my dad knew some people and got it straightened out, so he got his job back and I got a lecture from a couple of *******s about "bothering" the negroes and keeping them from doing their job. He got his job back, but that was only because I was willing to take some **** and went to my dad, (who gave a **** about the situation, but not the **** I subsequently received) who was willing to take some **** for a righteous cause and had "friends." As a result, we became pariahs in the neighborhood once the word got out, and I had kids at school calling me "****** lover." Which started a lot of one on five or one on six fights, until I got kicked out of (an all white public) school for "disruption" because I was both unwilling and, as a proper southerner, fundamentally unable to back down from these little *******s who got in my face en masse. So Ben, you don't know a thousandth of it, nor frankly, do I, because I saw it, I didn't live with it as a black person.

[MichaeltheGreat]

There were black lawyers and doctors....

Not many sourthern educated ones. If it wasn't sick, the University of Texas law school court cases would be funny. They had a colored applicant who passed all the tests and they couldn't come up with an excuse, so they told him thanks for applying, but we can't take you since we don't have a colored law school. So he went to court. And won. So they said, well, we can't afford to build a ****** law school for just one of you, so howsabout we pay to ship your ass to a yankee law school and we'll pay your tuition? So he went to court, again. And won. So then they let him in, but he had to have a separate desk in the hallway right outside the lecture room door. So he went to court again. And won. So finally they let him in the classroom, but it took three trips to federal court and several years.

Reverend King was born in 1929, when that was just starting to change reluctantly. The concept of colored doctors and lawyers were accepted because someone had to attend on the colored patients, or represent the colored boy at trial after he stole the white man's property. But they mostly got their advanced eduction up north (as did Rev. King), and they had to keep a fairly low profile, as they were already suspect as being uppity. Being a preacher was the only way a colored man could officially and openly perfect the art of running his mouth. As men of the cloth, they were given a bit more latitude.

[MichaeltheGreat]

It's not *just* about black people. The idea is the idea. Arguing that it's only valid because of what Dr. King suffered confuses the message from the messenger.

It is and it isn't, at the same time. The focus was on blacks because that was where the apartheid was most visible. You should read all the procedural history of some of the deeper civil rights cases like Gong Lum v Rice, where a "Chinaman" argues against classifying his daughter as "colored" instead of "white." The Jim Crow legal system was created specifically for the systematic oppression of black people, and when a few other non-whites showed up, then the question was were they white enough to be allowed as white, or should they be lumped in with coloreds.

Up north it was more subtle. There were "******" neighborhoods, and then there were the neighborhoods with explicit or implicit covenants not to sell to blacks (or often, Jews as well in northern cities).

It was never (in Rev. King's day) about "giving black people stuff" - it was just as basic as being able to travel, to eat at the front of a restaurant, etc.

Towards the end of WWII, Stars and Stripes ran an article written by a black corporal in a segregated MP unit in Louisiana (IIRC, they changed his name and some details to protect him). The corporal's job was to guard German enlisted POWs who were moved around to pick cotton, but the "colored" guards had to use "colored" rail cars and eat in back of the kitchen at diners, while enemy prisoners of war were allowed in the same rail cars and facilities as the white guards.

Although poverty became an issue, the original issue from the 20's and 30's (then on hold with WW2) was just plain fundamental civil rights. Look into sundown towns.

After WW2, there were also quite a few lynchings and lesser harassment of returning black soldiers who'd been promoted - it was one thing to be a private, but stripes on a ******, wearing a yankee army uniform? Nosiree. They were also some of the last to come back, because of the point system for returning troops, so that exacerbated things. I forget the specific of what town, but there was a case that got Pres. Truman's attention, where a black sergeant came back from Italy, where he'd gotten (IIRC) the silver star, and shortly after getting back into his hometown, a mob tore the stripes and decorations off his uniform and put his eyes out.

So it may not be just about black people, but the role and result of being born black was pretty dominant.