How MLK’s Leadership in the Negro Revolution Changed America Forever: MLK’s Missing Legacy
MLK’s Missing Legacy: Just in time for the King’s birthday month, we present a deep dive into Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s work. Our contributing writer Mike Green brings you this comprehensive look at history.
Explosively, America’s third revolution – the Negro Revolution – had begun.
“For the first time in the long and turbulent history of the nation, almost one thousand cities were engulfed in civil turmoil, with violence trembling just below the surface.”
King’s legacy spans from 1963 to his assassination in 1968. Coretta Scott King characterized his death as retribution for his focus on economic equity. This period unequivocally defined his leadership of the Negro Revolution. The significance of this revolution remains undeniable. The federal Department of Labor’s division of policy and research certainly took it seriously. In 1965, they published a report titled, “ The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” The report titles its first chapter, “ The Negro American Revolution.”
The Negro American revolution is rightly regarded as the most important domestic event of the postwar period in the United States.
Nothing like it has occurred since the upheavals of the 1930’s which led to the organization of the great industrial trade unions, and which in turn profoundly altered both the economy and the political scene. There have been few other events in our history – the American Revolution itself, the surge of Jacksonian Democracy in the 1830’s, the Abolitionist movement, and the Populist movement of the late 19th Century – comparable to the current Negro movement.
There has been none more important.
The Negro American revolution holds forth the prospect that the American Republic, which at birth was flawed by the institution of Negro slavery, and which throughout its history has been marred by the unequal treatment of Negro citizens, will at last redeem the full promise of the Declaration of Independence.
Note the central thesis of the federal report’s opening chapter. It compares the Negro Revolution to other historic events in U.S. history. The report states: “ there has been none more important.”
This statement is unequivocal. So, why do generations of Americans lack this knowledge? The system has denied this history to White Americans and all other racial demographics, including Black children.
Some people might try to explain away this dismissal of U.S. history’s most important movement. But President Lyndon B. Johnson will not allow it. His own words explain the core problems that sparked the Negro Revolution.
LBJ made strong statements in his 1965 State of the Union address. The report quotes these remarks. He referred directly to the hostile backlash sweeping across White America after the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The effort, no matter how savage and brutal, of some State and local governments to thwart the exercise of those rights is doomed. The nation will not put up with it — least of all the Negroes.
In this new period the expectations of the Negro Americans will go beyond civil rights. Being Americans, they will now expect that in the near future equal opportunities for them as a group will produce roughly equal results, as compared with other groups.
This is not going to happen. Nor will it happen for generations to come unless a new and special effort is made.
There are two reasons .
First, the racist virus in the American blood stream still afflicts us: Negroes will encounter serious personal prejudice for at least another generation.
Second, three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment [by White Americans] have taken their toll on the Negro people.
The harsh fact is that as a group, at the present time, in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of American life, they are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing.
Individually, Negro Americans reach the highest peaks of achievement. But collectively, in the spectrum of American ethnic and religious and regional groups, where some get plenty and some get none, where some send eighty percent of their children to college and others pull them out of school at the 8th grade, Negroes are among the weakest.
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