From our First Draft of History Department comes an on-the-scene account of the day in June 1967, when Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Harlem to speak to hospital workers: “We shall overcome. No lie can live forever.”
“The spirit of Gandhian agape that hung like a halo over Selma, with its nuns and angelic-faced students, was gone, replaced by a clenched militancy fueled by a despair expressed by Martin King's admission that his dream of Washington 1963 has turned into a nightmare.”
“To put it crudely, America would not exist without 244 years of black slavery, 85 years of Jim and Jane Crow, and now, one of two black kids caught in a violence-infested life of poverty.”
“Only by creating loyalties to something more universal than our immediate tribe — to ideas and values like community, tolerance, pluralism, and equality — can we begin the process of reciprocity and reconciliation between blacks and Jews.”
