Statement made by Ronald Reagan when he signed legislation designating Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday

 "America is a more democratic nation, a more just nation, a more peaceful nation because Martin Luther King, Jr., became her preeminent nonviolent commander." - President Ronald Reagan, 11/2/83

 

Remarks on Signing the Bill Making the Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., a National Holiday

November 2, 1983


The President. Mrs. King, members of the King family, distinguished Members of the Congress, ladies and gentlemen, honored guests, I'm very pleased to welcome you to the White House, the home that belongs to all of us, the American people.

When I was thinking of the contributions to our country of the man that we're honoring today, a passage attributed to the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier comes to mind. "Each crisis brings its word and deed." In America, in the fifties and sixties, one of the important crises we faced was racial discrimination. The man whose words and deeds in that crisis stirred our nation to the very depths of its soul was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King was born in 1929 in an America where, because of the color of their skin, nearly 1 in 10 lived lives that were separate and unequal. Most black Americans were taught in segregated schools. Across the country, too many could find only poor jobs, toiling for low wages. They were refused entry into hotels and restaurants, made to use separate facilities. In a nation that proclaimed liberty and justice for all, too many black Americans were living with neither.

 

In one city, a rule required all blacks to sit in the rear of public buses. But in 1955, when a brave woman named Rosa Parks was told to move to the back of the bus, she said, "No." A young minister in a local Baptist church, Martin Luther King, then organized a boycott of the bus company—a boycott that stunned the country. Within 6 months the courts had ruled the segregation of public transportation unconstitutional.

Dr. King had awakened something strong and true, a sense that true justice must be colorblind, and that among white and black Americans, as he put it, "Their destiny is tied up with our destiny, and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom; we cannot walk alone."

In the years after the bus boycott, Dr. King made equality of rights his life's work. Across the country, he organized boycotts, rallies, and marches. Often he was beaten, imprisoned, but he never stopped teaching nonviolence. "Work with the faith", he told his followers, "that unearned suffering is redemptive." In 1964 Dr. King became the youngest man in history to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Dr. King's work brought him to this city often. And in one sweltering August day in 1963, he addressed a quarter of a million people at the Lincoln Memorial. If American history grows from two centuries to twenty, his words that day will never be forgotten. "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood."

In 1968 Martin Luther King was gunned down by a brutal assassin, his life cut short at the age of 39. But those 39 short years had changed America forever. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had guaranteed all Americans equal use of public accommodations, equal access to programs financed by Federal funds, and the right to compete for employment on the sole basis of individual merit. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had made certain that from then on black Americans would get to vote. But most important, there was not just a change of law; there was a change of heart. The conscience of America had been touched. Across the land, people had begun to treat each other not as blacks and whites, but as fellow Americans.

And since Dr. King's death, his father, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., and his wife, Coretta King, have eloquently and forcefully carried on his work. Also his family have joined in that cause.

Now our nation has decided to honor Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by setting aside a day each year to remember him and the just cause he stood for. We've made historic strides since Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. As a democratic people, we can take pride in the knowledge that we Americans recognized a grave injustice and took action to correct it. And we should remember that in far too many countries, people like Dr. King never have the opportunity to speak out at all.

But traces of bigotry still mar America. So, each year on Martin Luther King Day, let us not only recall Dr. King, but rededicate ourselves to the Commandments he believed in and sought to live every day: Thou shall love thy God with all thy heart, and thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself. And I just have to believe that all of us—if all of us, young and old, Republicans and Democrats, do all we can to live up to those Commandments, then we will see the day when Dr. King's dream comes true, and in his words, "All of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning, '... land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.'"

Thank you, God bless you, and I will sign it.

Mrs. King. Thank you, Mr. President, Vice President Bush, Majority Leader Baker and the distinguished congressional and senatorial delegations, and other representatives who've gathered here, and friends.

All right-thinking people, all right-thinking Americans are joined in spirit with us this day as the highest recognition which this nation gives is bestowed upon Martin Luther King, Jr., one who also was the recipient of the highest recognition which the world bestows, the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his own life's example, he symbolized what was right about America, what was noblest and best, what human beings have pursued since the beginning of history. He loved unconditionally. He was in constant pursuit of truth, and when he discovered it, he embraced it. His nonviolent campaigns brought about redemption, reconciliation, and justice. He taught us that only peaceful means can bring about peaceful ends, that our goal was to create the love community.

America is a more democratic nation, a more just nation, a more peaceful nation because Martin Luther King, Jr., became her preeminent nonviolent commander.

Martin Luther King, Jr., and his spirit live within all of us. Thank God for the blessing of his life and his leadership and his commitment. What manner of man was this? May we make ourselves worthy to carry on his dream and create the love community. Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:06 a.m. in the Rose Garden at the White House.

As enacted, H.R. 3706 is Public Law 98-144, approved November 2.



Sources:

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=40708

https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/13/archives-president-reagan-designates-martin-luther-king-jr-day-federal-holiday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oEt0P-056s

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream: 60 Years Later in Cuba and the United States

"On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. led the Civil Rights Movement in a march on Washington. It culminated in his "I Have a Dream" speech." Like him, I have a dream of a free Cuba without dictatorship, where the rule of law is practiced and human rights are respected." - John Suarez, August  28, 2023 over Twitter. 

Sixty years ago on August 28, 1963 much of the United States was in the midst of a struggle to do away with segregation and civil rights activists were struggling to pass voting rights legislation. The march on Washington D.C. that culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.'s I have a dream speech sought to pressure legislators into voting for the legislation, and they succeeded.

This was a nonviolent revolution that sought justice, and changed the United States of America and 50 years later an African American president sat in the White House evidence that part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream has been achieved.

Lamentably, on August 26, 2023 a white man with an AR-15 "covered in swastikas killed three Black people Saturday at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, before fatally shooting himself, local law enforcement said, describing the attack as racially motivated."

The three black persons killed this past Saturday by a white supremacist are Anolt "AJ" Laguerre Jr., age 19 Jerrald De'Shaun Gallon, age 29 and Angela Michelle Carr, age 52.

The struggle for a society in which people are judged for the content of their character continues, is still needed for the dream to be fully fulfilled.

More about #Nonviolence365 from @BerniceKing#TheKingCenter #WorkingOnADream #DreamAgainMarchForward pic.twitter.com/SXqRONOsad

— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center (@TheKingCenter) August 26, 2023

Let us compare this with the violent revolution that sought to end a dictatorship ninety miles away from U.S. shores in Cuba that in 1963 was just four years old. Sixty four years later and the Castro dictatorship that replaced the Batista dictatorship is still in power killing and repressing. Despite fraudulent statistics in areas of health care and education the reality of its failure on both fronts was made evident during the pandemic, and the continuing mass exodus of millions of Cubans demonstrates the nightmare that exists in Cuba today. Today there are over a thousand Cubans imprisoned for demanding to be free.

Let us also not forget that many of those who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the 1950s took up arms again against him in the 1960s in an armed struggle that although courageous, failed, and the new dictatorship wiped out all opposition: both violent and nonviolent for years.

A nonviolent movement began to emerge out of the prisons in the mid 1970s and onto the streets in the mid 1980s yet there are voices that claim that nonviolence hasn't worked and counsel either collaboration with the dictatorship or violent resistance.

Sadly, despite the successes of the civil rights movement in the United States by 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. found his nonviolent posture challenged by a black power movement that instead of accelerating change in areas of social and economic justice brought it to a halt. Reverend King warned black activists not to take the way of Castro and Guevara:

“Riots just don’t pay off,” said King. He pronounced them an objective failure beyond morals or faith. “For if we say that power is the ability to effect change, or the ability to achieve purpose,” he said, “then it is not powerful to engage in an act that does not do that–no matter how loud you are, and no matter how much you burn.” Likewise, he exhorted the staff to combat the “romantic illusion” of guerrilla warfare in the style of Che Guevara. No “black” version of the Cuban revolution could succeed without widespread political sympathy, he asserted, and only a handful of the black minority itself favored insurrection. King extolled the discipline of civil disobedience instead, which he defined not as a right but a personal homage to untapped democratic energy. The staff must “bring to bear all of the power of nonviolence on the economic problem,” he urged, even though nothing in the Constitution promised a roof or a meal. “I say all of these things because I want us to know the hardness of the task,” King concluded, breaking off with his most basic plea: “We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now.”

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., like Gandhi before him, was assassinated on April 4, 1968 meanwhile Raul Castro has survived to the present day hanging on to power as the island of Cuba sinks into misery and despair with Miguel Diaz-Canel his puppet president, and his son Alejandro Castro Espin sharing power with his dad behind the scenes.

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas

Meanwhile two other courageous men, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, opposition leader and founder of the Christian Liberation Movement, and Harold Cepero, a youth leader from his movement who had been a seminarian were assassinated on July 22, 2012 for advocating nonviolent change in Cuba. Oswaldo had managed to obtain more than 25,000 signatures in a Stalinist dictatorship demanding a vote to change the system and recognize the rights and dignity of Cubans. Like Martin Luther King Jr. he was killed but his ideas and example live on to inspire others.

The dream survives in others even when the dreamer has been cut down by the forces of repression and hatred. 

This is why on the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington the King Center is saying "dream again, march forward." For as T. S. Eliot observed in 1927 "If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause."

60 years ago yesterday, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the U.S. from the Lincoln Monument’s steps. Yesterday images of Cuban martyrs and political prisoners were placed on this sacred ground.

Observing the 110th anniversary of the birth of Rosa Parks

"I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear." - Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks: Civil rights icon

Rosa Parks was born one hundred and ten years ago today, February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Four decades later, she would engage in a moment that would transform the United States of America through nonviolent action. Before the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. there was Rosa Parks. 

On December 1, 1955, while sitting in the back of the bus [the area reserved for African Americans during segregation], the "white" section was filled to capacity with a white man standing, and the bus driver told Rosa Parks to stand up and give him her seat.

Rosa Parks refused and she was arrested, finger printed, photographed, jailed and fined $14 dollars for refusing to give up her seat. This action would lead to the Montgomery bus boycott that would inspire people of good will to action. Civil rights pioneer Rev. James Lawson on June 20, 2010 described what it was like to learn of the boycott:

"December 6, 1955 that was the date when many people in the world learned of the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama; a very simple stroke it was not initially called a non-violent movement. But Rosa Parks, Ed Nixon, Mary Jo Robinson, Martin King, Ralph Abernathy, and a host of other people who engaged that first effort sent a wave of hope around the world."

Rosa Parks would go on to live a long and productive life and passed away on October 24, 2005 at the age of 92. She was laid in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Rosa Parks was the first woman and second non-government official to be honored in such a manner.

Today, a hundred and ten years after Rosa Parks was born, women in Cuba inspired by her example have organized a movement, Rosa Parks Women's Civil Rights Movement , named after the civil rights pioneer and are engaged in marches and demonstrations in defense of human rights in Cuba. Much has been achieved since 1955 but challenges still remain and for Cuban women the battle for basic human rights continues.

Remembering a non-violent icon on his passing: Requiescat in pace John Lewis

Some people love the world, but they don't love people. You have to respect the dignity and worth of every human being. Love everybody. - John Lewis, over twitter on March 5, 2015  

July 2, 1963, six leaders of the nation's civil rights organizations met at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York.

John Lewis passed away on July 17, 2020 after a long illness. He was the last living member of the Big Six civil rights leaders. The other five were: Reverend Martin Luther King Jr; Whitney Young of the National Urban League; A. Philip Randolph of the Negro American Labor Council; James L. Farmer Jr., of the Congress of Racial Equality; and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP.

He was a son of sharecroppers' who fought for civil rights using nonviolent means, and went on to a long career in Congress.

John Lewis in 1961

Imagine for a moment hundreds of young Americans threatened, attacked, imprisoned and responding with nonviolent resistance. This happened in the Freedom Rides initiated by the Congress of Racial Equality on May 16, 1961. Fifty years later they still gather to remember what happened and to tell new generations that they too can make a difference for the better. Twenty year old John Lewis was one of those young Americans putting his life on the line.

"Boarding that Greyhound bus to travel through the heart of the Deep South I felt good. I felt happy. I felt liberated. I was like a soldier in a nonviolent army" - Representative John Lewis, Freedom Riders trailer, American Experience, 2011

John Lewis helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was elected its chairman in 1963, making him one of the Big Six at the age of 23, and two years later he was leading a march over a bridge named after a Klansman in Selma, Alabama.

Two Minute Warning, Police readying to attack marchers in Selma on 3/7/65. Spider Martin

The Library of Congress described one of the first flashpoints in the Selma conflict began on March 7, 1965 with John Lewis and Hosea Williams leading marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge that became known as Bloody Sunday:

On Sunday March 7, 1965, about six hundred people began a fifty-four mile march from Selma, Alabama to the state capitol in Montgomery. They were demonstrating for African American voting rights and to commemorate the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, shot three weeks earlier by an state trooper while trying to protect his mother at a civil rights demonstration. On the outskirts of Selma, after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers, in plain sight of photographers and journalists, were brutally assaulted by heavily armed state troopers and deputies.

Thanks to press on hand the world saw in video and photographs the brutality visited upon nonviolent demonstrators that day who maintained their nonviolent discipline in spite of the brutal attacks on them by the local authorities in Selma. 

It would lead through a protracted struggle into a march from Selma to Montgomery on March 25, 1965 led by Martin Luther King Jr. and would serve to usher in the 1965 Voting Rights Act for African Americans in the United States signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on August 5, 1965.

Back in 2014 Congressman Lewis spent three hours in an in-depth interview on C-SPAN talking about his life, and is available below.


Fifty years after Selma, Congressman John Lewis would meet with Cuban dissidents currently engaged in civil disobedience in Cuba inspired by his struggle half a century ago. The positive fruits of nonviolence knows no bounds.

Congressman John Lewis meets with Cuban dissidents in 2015

In 2015 Representative John Lewis, sat down with Cuban dissidents, Jorge Luis García Pérez Antúnez, Yris Pérez Aguilera and engaged them in conversation. These opposition activists were being accompanied by Eddy Acevedo, of Congresswoman Ileana Ros Lehtinen's office.

Civil rights icon and Member of Congress John Lewis (1940 - 2020)

Thank you Congressman John Lewis for your life of service, leadership, and example of nonviolent resistance that made the United States a better place. Thank you for showing us how to get into good trouble. 

Requiescat in pace John Lewis

Civil Rights Icon? Angela Davis, Erich Honecker and the Wall

The wall that Angela does not want to talk about.

Angela Davis hosted by Erich Honecker in East Germany in 1972

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) rescinded the Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award, due to her controversial past. Following board resignations, and protests the Alabama Civil Rights Center decided to honor her after all citing their "commitment to learning from its mistakes and in order to stay true to the BCRI’s mission."

Fred L. Shuttlesworth was a civil rights icon who worked with Martin Luther King Jr., and courageously risked his life numerous times while maintaining a commitment to nonviolence to combat racism and segregation.

According to BCRI recipients of the Shuttlesworth award must embody the principles that guided the American Civil Rights Movement and characterized the life of Fred L. Shuttlesworth:

• A philosophy of non-violence and reconciliation
• Courage, both moral and physical, in the face of great odds
• Humility
• Leadership by example
• An established commitment to human-rights activities

This blog has documented Angela Davis's embrace of revolutionary violence and communism which are inconsistent with "a philosophy of non-violence and reconciliation." Davis also hobnobbed with a dictator responsible for the murder of scores of East Germans.

Angela Davis paid two visits to East Germany (in 1965 and 1972).  During her 1972 visit she was received by Erich Honecker. She celebrated the East German communist regime and refused to criticize, or recognize their short comings on human rights. She refuses to make references to the Berlin Wall in her autobiography.

Angela Davis visited Cuba in 1972 and Fidel Castro made her an honorary member of the infamous Committee in the Defense of the Revolution (CDR). Neighborhood committees that spied on Cubans to ensure their loyalty to the dictatorship.



Angela Davis never reconsidered her admiration for Fidel Castro despite his terrible human rights record and racism. Fidel Castro also visited the Berlin Wall. During Castro's first visit to Berlin on June 13, 1972 the Cuban dictator addressed the border guards that policed the Berlin Wall. At Brandenburg gate on June 14 he addressed the men charged with shooting East Germans fleeing to West Germany as "the courageous and self-denying border guards of the GDR People's Army who stand guard in the front line of the entire-socialist community." Later in the evening Fidel Castro addressed the Nikolay Bezarin Barracks in East Berlin:

"It is very important to know that the people of the GDR have great confidence in you, that they are truly proud of you. The comrades of the party and the citizens of socialist Berlin have told us with great satisfaction about the activity of the border troops, speaking with great admiration for you and for your services."

The criminal nature of the East German regime was revealed in a "seven-page order, dated October 1, 1973 and found [in 2007] in the regional archive office in the eastern city of Magdeburg, shows that the Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi, had told guards: "Do not hesitate to use your firearm, not even when the border is breached in the company of women and children, which is a tactic the traitors have often used."

Angela Davis's host Eric Honecker and four other co-defendants were put on trial in a Berlin regional court on November 12, 1992. They were charged with 68 counts of manslaughter and attempted manslaughter at the inner-German border [Berlin Wall], which Honecker had fashioned as an impassable armed and guarded 'death strip.'" The court ended the trial without a verdict because it said that Honecker was too ill to stand trial and that to force him to do so would be a human rights violation. Honecker fled to Chile and died in exile.

Erich Honecker and Angela Davis in 1972

It is important to also recall that Martin Luther King Jr. paid a visit to East Berlin in 1964. However  their visits were world's apart. King's message of nonviolent resistance to injustice, God's plan and the struggle for freedom rattled East German authorities. Reverend King upon seeing the Berlin Wall criticized it and called it "very depressing." Davis just had praise for the East German regime.

Whereas the Soviet Union engaged in active measures to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. the Russians spent considerable resources to assist Professor Davis. It was not surprising considering her communist background that she sided with the oppressors and not the oppressed when she traveled in the East Bloc. Nor did it go unnoticed. When the Russian writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn visited the United States  and on July 9, 1975 addressed the AFL-CIO and spoke of her.

“There’s a certain woman here named Angela Davis. I don’t know if you are familiar with her in this country, but in our country, literally, for an entire year, we heard of nothing at all except Angela Davis. There was only Angela Davis in the whole world and she was suffering. We had our ears stuffed with Angela Davis. Little children in school were told to sign petitions in defense of Angela Davis. Little boys and girls, eight and nine years old, were asked to do this. She was set free, as you know. Although she didn’t have too difficult a time in this country’s jails, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts. Some Soviet dissidents–but more important, a group of Czech dissidents–addressed an appeal to her: `Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?’ Angela Davis answered: `They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.’ That is the face of Communism. That is the heart of Communism for you.

On August 5, 1979 she received the Lenin Prize in Moscow from the Soviet Union. A dictatorship that was an enemy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Shuttlesworth because they both advocated nonviolent resistance and reconciliation.


   
Cathy Young has written a thoughtful analysis that is required reading to place in greater context the controversy surrounding Angela Davis receiving a civil rights award. If one wanted to give her an award for being a "revolutionary icon" then that would fit what she has done, but "civil rights" icon does not.

BCRI's mistake was not rescinding the award, but announcing that they were giving the award to Angela Davis in the first place.

Angela Davis in East Germany

All eyes on Venezuela today: Opposition takes to the street in support of Maduro recall

Opposition calls for massive and nonviolent protests in the streets

"LET US ALL GO TO THE STREET TO TOGETHER  DEFEND CHANGE"

Despite President Maduro's state of emergency in order to silence and intimidate dissent the opposition is taking to the street at 10:00am today Caracas time and one main gathering point is the Plaza Venezuela.

This at a moment when Maduro is calling the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil a coup, despite the process there being constitutional, and one that Rousseff's party had backed in removing a previous Brazilian president from power.  He has also recalled the Venezuelan ambassador to Brazil in protest.

At the same time Nicolas Maduro is claiming that there is a global media "hate" campaign against Venezuela. Let us review the real crisis in Venezuela which is caused by the Maduro regime and its Cuban advisers:

Maduro is threatening to dissolve the democratically elected National Assembly because members are rejecting the state of emergency, which would limit political freedoms.

Opposition leaders, including students, continue to be shot in the head in Venezuela, with the most recent documented incident being on May 5, 2016.

Nonviolent opposition leaders, such as Leopoldo Lopez, have been subjected to show trials and arbitrarily detained for years.

There is no independent judiciary in Venezuela. Judges are expected to do the executive branch's bidding and if they follow the rule of law can be imprisoned and raped.

Venezuela is imploding and the Maduro regime and its Cuban handlers are responsible. Shockingly the Secretary of State of the United States now views Cuba as a partner in stabilizing Venezuela despite the fact that it is the Castro regime that is responsible, in large part for the mess there.

All eyes on Venezuela today when the opposition is taking to the streets and the Maduro regime is threatening civil and political liberties there.

Martin Luther King Jr. and his constant commitment to nonviolence as a method of struggle

"Before the victory's won, even some will have to face physical death. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent psychological death, then nothing shall be more redemptive." - Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., We Shall Overcome, June 17, 1966

Martin Luther King Jr. Photograph (c) Bernard J. Kleina (1966)

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was born 87 years ago today on January 15, 1929. Although a day has been set aside in recognition of his impact on American history his nonviolent legacy is not fully understood but remains relevant and important for the future of human civilization. This was a man who came to national prominence leading a bus boycott in the nonviolent defense of Rosa Parks who had been arrested for not giving up her seat on a bus to a white man on December 1, 1955. Before the boycott was successfully ended, Martin Luther King Jr.'s home was bombed on January 30, 1956.

This southern baptist minister was considered so dangerous that both the FBI and the KGB targeted him in campaigns to discredit him because they could not control him and the civil rights movement under his leadership achieved concrete successes that challenged established structures of power. Reverend King advocated standing up and being aggressive but with "understanding, good will and with a sense of discipline," that was also "a demanding love" that rejected hatred. His ideas and example deserve a closer examination.

50 years ago in Hollywood, Florida on May 18, 1966 Martin Luther King Jr. discussed in great detail, at a time when other voices were counseling revolutionary violence, the nonviolent alternative in which he first described how a nonviolent movement must mobilize oppressed people for nonviolent resistance to injustice:

People are huddled in ghettos, living in the most crowded and depressing conditions. They need some outlet; some way to express their legitimate discontent. What is a better way than to provide non-violent channels through which they can do it? If this isn't provided they are going to find it through more irrational, misguided means. So the non-violent movement has a job to do, in providing the non-violent channels through which those who are caught in these conditions can express their discontent and frustration. 

Martin Luther King Jr. reaffirmed his commitment to non-violence while recognizing the consequences of such a position: 

Now let me say that I'm still convinced that non-violence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and human dignity. And I'd like to say just a word about this philosophy since it has been the underlying philosophy of our movement. It has power because it has a way of disarming the opponent. It exposes his moral defenses, it weakens his morale. And at the same time it works on his heart and on his conscience, and he just doesn't know what to do. If he doesn't hit you, wonderful. If he hits you you develop the quiet courage of accepting blows without retaliating. If he doesn't put you in jail, that's very nice, nobody with any sense loves to go to jail. But if he puts you in jail you go in that jail and transform it from a dungeon of shame into a haven of freedom and human dignity. Even if he tries to kill you, you develop the inner conviction that there are some things so precious, some things so eternally true that they are worth dying for. If a man has not discovered some thing that he will die for, he isn't fit to live. 

Reverend King understood, as did Mohandas Gandhi, that Machiavelli was wrong, the ends do not justify the means:

 There's another good thing about non-violence: through it a person can use moral means to procure moral ends. There are still those who sincerely believe that the end justifies the means, no matter what the means happen to be. No matter how violent or how deceptive or anything else they are. Non-violence at its best would break with the system that argues that. Non-violence would say that the morality of the ends is implicit in the means, and that in the long-run of history destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends. So since we are working toward a just society in this movement, we should use just methods to get there. Since we are working for the end of a non-violent society in this movement, we must use non-violent means and methods to get there.

Martin Luther King, Jr. would've been 87 years old today but never saw 40 because an assassin shot the 39 year old Baptist minister in the head on April 4, 1968 at 6:01pm in the midst of the final campaign before his death: the support of a strike by sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. King's legacy lives on not only in the United States but inspired Cuban democrats such as Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas who have also been martyred in the struggle for justice, freedom and human dignity.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s Dream: 50 Years Later in Cuba and the United States

Fifty years from that speech by Martin Luther King Jr. and like him I have a dream of a Cuba that is inclusive, plural and modern where we all fit. - Yoani Sanchez,  August 28, 2013 over twitter 

Martin Luther King Jr

Fifty years ago on August 28, 1963 much of the United States was in the midst of a struggle to do away with segregation and civil rights activists were struggling to pass voting rights legislation. The march on Washington D.C. that culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.'s I have a dream speech sought to pressure legislators into voting for the legislation, and they succeeded.

This was a nonviolent revolution that sought justice, and changed the United States of America and today an African American president sits in the White House evidence that part of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream has been achieved.

Let us compare this with the violent revolution that sought to end a dictatorship ninety miles away from U.S. shores in Cuba that in 1963 was just four years old. Fifty years later and the Castro dictatorship that replaced the Batista dictatorship is still in power killing and repressing. Despite fraudulent statistics in areas of health care and education the reality of an ongoing cholera epidemic and the mass exodus of millions of Cubans demonstrates the nightmare that exists in Cuba today. Tonight an unjustly imprisoned Cuban is on his 30th day on hunger strike demanding to be free.

Let us also not forget that many who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the 1950s took up arms again against him in the 1960s in an armed struggle that failed wiping out all opposition: violent and nonviolent for years.

A nonviolent movement began to emerge out of the prisons in the mid 1970s and onto the streets in the mid 1980s yet there are voices that claim that nonviolence hasn't worked and counsel either collaboration with the dictatorship or violent resistance.

Sadly, despite the successes of the civil rights movement in the United States by 1967 Martin Luther King Jr. found his nonviolent posture challenged by a black power movement that instead of accelerating change in areas of social and economic justice brought it to a halt. Reverend King warned black activists not to take the way of Castro and Guevara:

“Riots just don’t pay off,” said King. He pronounced them an objective failure beyond morals or faith. “For if we say that power is the ability to effect change, or the ability to achieve purpose,” he said, “then it is not powerful to engage in an act that does not do that–no matter how loud you are, and no matter how much you burn.” Likewise, he exhorted the staff to combat the “romantic illusion” of guerrilla warfare in the style of Che Guevara. No “black” version of the Cuban revolution could succeed without widespread political sympathy, he asserted, and only a handful of the black minority itself favored insurrection. King extolled the discipline of civil disobedience instead, which he defined not as a right but a personal homage to untapped democratic energy. The staff must “bring to bear all of the power of nonviolence on the economic problem,” he urged, even though nothing in the Constitution promised a roof or a meal. “I say all of these things because I want us to know the hardness of the task,” King concluded, breaking off with his most basic plea: “We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now.”

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., like Gandhi before him, was assassinated on April 4, 1968 meanwhile Fidel Castro has survived to the present day hanging on to power and turning it over to his brother as the island of Cuba sinks into misery and despair.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas

 Meanwhile another courageous man of Christian faith, Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas and a youth leader from his movement who had been a seminarian were martyred on July 22, 2012 for advocating nonviolent change in Cuba. Oswaldo had managed to obtain more than 25,000 signatures in a Stalinist dictatorship demanding a vote to change the system and recognize the rights and dignity of Cubans. Like Martin Luther King Jr. he was killed but his ideas and example live on to inspire others.

The dream survives in others even when the dreamer has been cut down by the forces of repression and hatred.

Observing the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rosa Parks

"I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear." - Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks was born one hundred years ago today, February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. Four decades later she would engage in a moment that would transform the United States of America through nonviolent action. Before the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. there was Rosa Parks. On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama sitting in the back of the bus [the area reserved for African Americans during Segregation] the "white" section having been filled to capacity with a white man standing the bus driver told Rosa Parks to stand up and give her seat to him. 


Rosa Parks refused and she was arrested, finger printed, photographed, jailed and fined $14 dollars for refusing to give up her seat. This action would lead to the Montgomery bus boycott that would inspire people of good will to action. Civil rights pioneer Rev. James Lawson on June 20, 2010 described what it was like to learn of the boycott:

"December 6, 1955 that was the date when many people in the world learned of the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama; a very simple stroke it was not initially called a non-violent movement. But Rosa Parks, Ed Nixon, Mary Jo Robinson, Martin King, Ralph Abernathy, and a host of other people who engaged that first effort sent a wave of hope around the world."

Rosa Parks would go on to live a long and productive life and passed away on October 24, 2005 at the age of 92. She was laid in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Rosa Parks was the first woman and second non-government official to be honored in such a manner.

Today, a hundred years after Rosa Parks was born, women in Cuba inspired by her example have organized a movement, Rosa Parks Women's Civil Rights Movement , named after the civil rights pioneer and are engaged in marches and demonstrations in defense of human rights in Cuba. Much has been achieved since 1955 but challenges still remain and for Cuban women the battle for basic human rights continues.