Lincoln To Luther,a Saga Of American Struggle

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Lincoln to Luther: A Saga of American Struggle Slavery is almost as old as civilization itself. The great early civilizations were all based on the backs of innumerable slaves, and slaves were common throughout feudal Europe as late as AD 1200. In central and south America, the Spanish conquerors enslaved millions of native Americans to work in their lands and serve in their houses. However, it was with the ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492, that slavery really became big business. Black peoples were brought in from the west coast of Africa. Britain was the main slave trading nation and which surprisingly abolished slavery earlier. The first recorded cargo of African slaves arrived in 1518. Between then and 1865 when slavery was abolished officially, it is estimated that over fifteen million men, women and children were shipped across the Atlantic. After 1713, Great Britain became the premier slaving nation, transporting about seventy thousand people per year to the West Indies and North America. Great Britain abolished slavery within the British Isles in 1772, when Lord Chief Justice Mansfield handed down his historic decision that ‘as soon as any slave sets foot on England ground, he becomes free.’ (Schoredt &Brown,1995, p.60) The declaration of independence written to King George III of England when, in 1776, Americans broke away from British rule said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” The founding fathers of the United States included slaves among those goods which they would not import in1774, and the trade was halted until 1783. They would have abolished slavery completely but two states – South Carolina and Georgia – held out against this threat to their economies. All northern states abolished slavery early on – the last was New Jersey in 1804. However, the south insisted that the principle of slavery should be permitted in the new states that were being added to the union after 1845.

 

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An abolitionist movement dedicated to ending slavery had existed in the U.S. from the start-with Blacks themselves among its most powerful voices – but it became more outspoken and radical as the 19th century progressed. From about 1830 onwards, there was a steady, if not very effective, rumbling form the north demanding total abolition of slavery. Slavery was one of the most controversial aspects of American history. It brought the country of the United States to the brink of collapse in the 1860s. In 1861, eleven southern states formed the Confederacy and broke away from the United States over abolition. The American civil war, between the north and the south, followed. After four years of fighting and over half a million deaths, the north won and the south eleven confederate states were reunited with the USA. The Emancipation Proclamation was passed and by then, at last, the slaves were free. Sproule’s description of the slave-trade shows that the condition of the slaves was miserable but the traders were in the limelight. By the year Abraham Lincoln entered Congress, healthy slaves were being sold at $2,500 each. And slave-traders turned themselves into millionaires with each “Middle Passage”. Illegal, fast-moving, and slimed with blood stained profit, the hideous trade went on and on. (1994, p.18)

Before his election in 1860 as the first Republican president, Lincoln had been a country lawyer, an Illinois state legislator(1834), a member of the United States House of Representatives (1846), and twice an unsuccessful candidate for election to the U.S. Senate. When he became the 16th President of the United States, he successfully led the country through its greatest internal crisis, the American Civil War(1861-1865), preserving the Union and ending slavery. As an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States, Lincoln won the Republican Party nomination in 1860 and was elected president later that year. His tenure in office was occupied primarily with the defeat of the secessionist Confederate States of America

 

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in the American Civil War. He introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.The Emancipation Proclamation, announced on September 22, 1862 and put into effect on January 1, 1863, freed slaves in territories not already under Union control. As Union armies advanced south, more slaves were liberated until all of them in Confederate territory (over three million) were freed. While signing the proclamation paper Lincoln said: "I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper." The proclamation declared "all persons held as slaves within any States, or designated part of the State, the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." For some time, Lincoln continued earlier plans to set up colonies for the newly freed slaves. He commented favorably on colonization in the Emancipation Proclamation, but all attempts at such a massive undertaking failed. This Emancipation Proclamation actually freed few people. It did not apply to slaves in border states fighting on the Union side; nor did it affect slaves in southern areas already under Union control. Naturally, the states in rebellion did not act on Lincoln's order. But the proclamation did show Americans - and the world - that the civil war was now being fought to end slavery. Here is one short excerpt from The Emancipation Proclamation (Microsoft Encarta, 2008) "…and, by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated states and parts of states are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.” Nevertheless, that was in theory only. For over a hundred years since the end of the war, the southern states had resisted national efforts to give black people an equal chance. The southern whites blamed the black people for the war, the defeat and the resulting poverty. Their leaders had tried to preserve their old way of life, their ‘heritage.’ In addition, the black people, owning no land and having no education, had found progress almost impossible.

 

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Commenting on Lincoln, Connors (2008) says that an important fact to know about Lincoln is that he was a savvy politician. The Emancipation Proclamation was a document that officially changed nothing. Congress had already passed laws outlawing slavery in the rebel states, which was the only territory Lincoln covered in the Proclamation. And the Proclamation took effect on Jan. 1, 1863, two years after the Civil War began - what took Lincoln so long? Speaking of enforcement, the Proclamation technically freed slaves in another country - the Confederacy had seceded. So what happened to the slaves in the Union? They had to wait until 1865 for the passage of the slavery-abolishing 13th Amendment to the Constitution on Dec. 18, which was not officially ratified until after Lincoln was assassinated. While it didn't technically set anyone free, the Proclamation was part of Lincoln's strategy to demoralize the South, and it worked. Lincoln didn't free the slaves. Slavery was abolished because of the sacrifices and struggles of millions of people--Blacks as well as whites. But Lincoln did play an important role. He deserves to be remembered, not for all the trivia that will be wheeled out at celebrations supposedly in his honor today, but as a participant in one of the great struggles for freedom in history. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is one of the most quoted speeches in United States history. It was delivered at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, during the American Civil War, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the decisive Battle of Gettysburg. In just over two minutes, Lincoln invoked the principles of human equality espoused by the Declaration of Independence and redefined the Civil War as a struggle not merely for the Union, but as "a new birth of freedom" that would bring true equality to all of its citizens, and that would also create a unified nation in which states' rights were no longer dominant. Beginning with the now-iconic phrase "Four score and seven years ago...", Lincoln referred to the events of the Civil War and described the ceremony at Gettysburg as an opportunity not only to consecrate the grounds of a cemetery, but also to dedicate the living to the struggle to ensure that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth". (Microsoft Encarta, 2008)

 

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Tragically, President Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 meant that the one chance to reconstruct the south in a new mould was lost. The old southern leaders were not excluded from office and so they were able to pass the ‘Black Codes’ which denied black people all but the most basic civil rights and liberties. It was in response to this oppression that the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, establishing the rights of black people to be US citizens and to equal protection under the law, came into effect in march 1870 by the 15th Amendment (made in 1869) which gave voting rights to all US citizens regardless of ‘race, color, or previous condition of servitude.’ However, the north left the south to deal with black people as they wished. The result was that, by 1895, practically all blacks had been denied the vote. Yes, the confederacy had been beaten. The slaves on which its wealth had been founded were now free citizens: full voting members of US society. But never would most white southerners accept the idea that black people were their equals. And, within months of Lincoln’s death, the whites realized they could frustrate the spirit of his laws with laws of their own. The war and the emancipation proclamation had killed off the south’s old slave code. But the war was scarcely over before the southern states started making new rules to keep blacks in subjection. The Civil War (April 12 1861-april 9 1865) is rightly called the "second American Revolution," because its roots lie in the first revolution of 1776 against the rule of the British monarchy – and the contradiction at the heart of the new United States. “After the war the US became rich and powerful, a place of opportunity and success. But at the edges of the great cities were the run-down shanty-towns where the black people lived – slaves no longer but often second-class citizens. Ignorant whites prided themselves that they were a superior race- and that every black, however intelligent and decent, was an inferior human being. They addressed every black man, however old and dignified, as “Boy”.” ( Schloredt & Brown,1995, p.6)

 

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What slaves hated most about slavery was not the hard work to which they were subjected, but their lack of control over their lives, their lack of freedom. According to Schloredt and Brown (1995), “After the civil war, the southern states passed laws that separated blacks and whites, and helped to keep blacks poor and unequal. These laws were called ‘Jim Crow’ after the name of a well-known minstrel song.” (p.7) Worse after the civil war, a terrible organization had been founded, called the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Like Nazis, the members of the KKK believe themselves to be a superior race. The KKK could lynch a black man for the mere suspicion of having laid hands on a white woman, yet white men thought it almost a game to attack black woman and were never punished. (ibid, p.7) The situation reached its worst point about 1900 when the Ku Klux Klan turned up actively; between 1889 and 1919 nearly three thousand black men and women were lynched. But, grim though things still looked, changes were now on the way. Powerful black organizations were emerging, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pledged to achieve true freedom for the USA’s black people. Black leaders were emerging too and, as the century went on, their stature and power would grow. In the 1950s when Martin Luther King took over the leadership of the black civil rights movement, most blacks were still poor and under-educated. Progress was blocked at every turn. For example, even though blacks were legally allowed to vote, so many obstacles had been placed in their way in the southern states, that only five per cent had been able to register. In Alabama, anti-black posters that read “Go home to Africa” could be seen. The segregation on the buses was strict. The first four rows were absolutely forbidden to blacks at all times and were under a ‘whites only’ sign. If the bus began to fill up, any blacks in the middle section had to stand up so that white passengers could sit down. (ibid, p.19)

 

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Here is how the blacks protested the racial segregation in the public buses in Montgomery. In March 1955, a fifteen-year-old school girl, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man in compliance with the Jim Crow laws. On the evening of December 1, 1955, a black lady named Rosa Parks got on a bus and sat on a seat in the middle section seat because all the seats in the back section were already taken. The rule was that if even one white person sat down in that section, all the blacks seated there were expected to get up. At the next bus stop, a handful of white passengers got on and took all the remaining ‘whites only’ seats at the front of the bus. One white man remained standing, and so the driver turned around to where Mrs Parks and three other black passengers were sitting. ‘I need those seats, he said. The other three got up but she stayed seated. There seemed no good reason why one man needed more than one seat. But she was arrested for the same reason. Then the black leaders met together on the Friday after Mrs Parks’ arrest and decided to boycott the buses from Monday onwards. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, urged and planned by Nixon and led by King, soon followed. The boycott lasted for 385 days, and the situation became so tense that King's house was bombed. King was arrested during this campaign, which ended with a United States District Court ruling in Browder v. Gayle that ended racial segregation on all Montgomery

public

buses.

(www.biography_files\Martin

Luther

King

-

Biography.html) When the bus boycott was over fulfilling their three demands – bus drivers would treat black passengers with courtesy, passengers would be seated on a first-come, first-serve basis, with blacks beginning from the back and whites from the front., and the bus company must immediately hire black drivers on routes through black areas – he said to the crowd, “ I would be terribly disappointed if any of you go back to the buses bragging, ‘we , the Negroes, won a victory over the whites.’ We must take this not as victory over the white men but as a victory for justice and democracy.”

 

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Schloredt and Brown (1995)maintain that King was so firm in his belief that if he were wrong then the justice was a lie. Stressing the justice of their cause King said, “If we are wrong, the supreme court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer who never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie. (p.26) In 1957, King, Ralph Abernathy, and other civil rights activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The group was created to harness the moral authority and organizing power of black churches to conduct non-violent protests in the service of civil rights reform. King led the SCLC until his death. Gandhi's nonviolent techniques were useful to King's campaign to correct the civil rights laws implemented in Alabama. King applied non-violent philosophy to the protests organized by the SCLC. King believed that organized, nonviolent protest against the system of southern segregation known as Jim Crow laws would lead to extensive media coverage of the struggle for black equality and voting rights. Journalistic accounts and televised footage of the daily deprivation and indignities suffered by southern blacks, and of segregationist violence and harassment of civil rights workers and marchers, produced a wave of sympathetic public opinion that convinced the majority of Americans that the Civil Rights Movement was the most important issue in American politics in the early 1960s. King organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights. Most of these rights were successfully enacted into the law of the United States with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Inspired by Gandhi's success with non-violent activism, King visited the Gandhi family in India in 1959.The trip to India affected King in a profound way, deepening his understanding of nonviolent resistance and his commitment to America's struggle for civil rights.

 

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In a radio address made during his final evening in India, King reflected, "Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.” (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin Luther King) In 1960, a black student was refused service at a bus-terminal lunch counter and joined with other students in staging a protest following the example of non-violence that had been so successful in Montgomery in the bus boycott. In the students’ movement , King gave them every encouragement joining them is some of their sit-ins. During a sit-in in Atlanta, king was arrested with 75 other demonstrators. The students were released after a few days, but king’s case was brought to trial and the judge pronounced: ‘I find the dependent guilty and sentence him to four months hard labor at the state penitentiary.’after hearing this senator John F. Kennedy telephoned Coretta and offered his help. Few days later the judge had reversed his decision and king was home again. It may be that his support to King won JFK the Presidency. Schloredt and Brown (1995) state that in spite of king’s effective leadership, the segregation in the south was terrible. Under king’s leadership, a great deal of progress was made. However, even today, there is still much de facto segregation particularly in the southern rural areas. The law says there is now equality but the prejudiced whites just walk around the law. The restaurants used to be open only to whites. So when the law made this illegal the restaurants simply closed. In many small southern towns there are now no bars, hairdressers or restaurants. In addition, the de-segregated government schools have only black pupils. All the white children have been taken out and sent to private schools. (p.61) Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister, was a driving force in the push for racial equality in the 1950's and the 1960's. In 1963, King and his staff focused on Birmingham, Alabama. They

 

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marched and protested non-violently that forced the white leaders of Birmingham to concede(admit) to some anti-segregation demands. Thrust into the national spotlight in Birmingham, where he was arrested and jailed, King helped organize a massive march on Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963. The march did, however, make specific demands: an end to racial segregation in public school; meaningful civil rights legislation, including a law prohibiting racial discrimination in employment; protection of civil rights workers from police brutality; a $2 minimum wage for all workers; and self-government for Washington, D.C., then governed by congressional committee. (www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin Luther King) ‘We seek the freedom in 1963 promised in 1863.’ ‘A century old debt to pay.’ Kind of posters were displayed in the march. The assembled masses marched down the Washington Mall from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, heard speeches by many black leaders and future U.S. Representative from Georgia John Lewis. King's appearance was the last of the event. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King evoked the name of Lincoln in his "I Have a Dream" speech, which is credited with mobilizing supporters of desegregation and prompted the 1964 Civil Rights Act. King's "I Have a Dream" speech electrified the crowd. It is regarded, along with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Franklin D. Roosevelt's Infamy Speech, as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory. (www.wikipedia.org/ free encyclopedia)In 1964, At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., became the youngest person to have received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to end racial segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement. (www.biography_files\Martin Luther King - Biography.htm) The

following

is

an

excerpt

from

his

speech

“I

have

a

dream”.

[www.usconstitution.net/dream.html] Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

 

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But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. Therefore, we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. Giving the finest speech of his life “I have a dream” on 28 August, 1963 in front of the Lincoln Memorial, king ended, When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty we are free at last! (Schloredt & Brown, 1995, p.50) Martin Luther King Jr. expressed a view that black Americans, as well as other disadvantaged Americans, should be compensated for historical wrongs. In an interview conducted for Playboy in 1965, he said that granting black Americans only equality could not realistically close the economic gap between them and whites. King said that he did not seek a full restitution of wages lost to slavery, which he believed impossible, but proposed a government compensatory program of US$50 billion over ten years to all disadvantaged groups. He posited, "The money spent would be more than amply justified by the benefits that would accrue to the nation through a spectacular decline in school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting and other social evils". He presented this idea as an application of the common

 

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law regarding settlement of unpaid labor but clarified that he felt that the money should not be spent exclusively on blacks. He stated, "It should benefit the disadvantaged of all races." (www.wikipedia.org/ free encyclopedia)

King and SCLC, in partial collaboration with SNCC, attempted to organize a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, for March 7, 1965. The first attempt to march on March 7 was aborted because of mob and police violence against the demonstrators. This day has since become known as Bloody Sunday. Bloody Sunday was a major turning point in the effort to gain public support for the Civil Rights Movement, the clearest demonstration up to that time of the dramatic potential of King's nonviolence strategy. King, however, was not present. After meeting with President Lyndon B. Johnson, he decided not to endorse the march, but it was carried out against his wishes and without his presence on March 7 by local civil rights leaders. Footage of police brutality against the protesters was broadcast extensively and aroused national public outrage. Starting in 1965, King began to express doubts about the United States' role in the Vietnam War (1959 to 1975). [The United States became involved in Vietnam because American policymakers believed that if the entire country fell under a Communist government, Communism would spread throughout Southeast Asia. This belief was known as the “domino theory.” The U.S. government, therefore, helped to create the anti-Communist South Vietnamese government. This government’s repressive policies led to rebellion in the South, and in 1960 the NLF was formed with the aim of overthrowing the government of South Vietnam and reunifying the country. In 1965, the United States sent in troops to prevent the South Vietnamese government from collapsing. Ultimately, however, the United States failed to achieve its goal, and in 1975 Vietnam was reunified under Communist control; in 1976 it officially became the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. During the conflict, nearly 58,000 Americans lost their lives. (Microsoft Encarta, 2008)] On April 4, 1967 appearance at the New York City Riverside Church—exactly one year before his death—King delivered a speech titled "Beyond Vietnam". In the speech, he spoke strongly against the U.S.'s role in the war, insisting that the U.S. was in Vietnam "to

 

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occupy it as an American colony" and calling the U.S. government "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today". King also was opposed to the Vietnam War on the grounds that the war took money and resources that could have been spent on social welfare services like the War on Poverty. He summed up this aspect by saying, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death". (www.wikipedia.org/ free encyclopedia) On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977 and Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.King's main legacy was to secure progress on civil rights in the United States, which has enabled more Americans to reach their potential. He is frequently referenced as a human rights icon today. Therefore, he became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure It was a recording of his "Drum Major" sermon, given on February 4, 1968. In that sermon, King made a request that at his funeral no mention of his awards and honors be made, but that it be said that he tried to "feed the hungry", "clothe the naked", "be right on the [Vietnam] war question", and "love and serve humanity". It proves that he was truly devoted to the people. This is a story of intense violence and determined resistance. People were not easily enslaved. Slavery was a coercive system sustained by the mobilization of the entire society, and its maintenance rested on the use of unimaginable violence and the constant threat of violence. It is also an inspiring story about those who would not allow their spirits to be broken by the violence of slavery, those who found ways to create families and communities, and those few who managed to escape to freedom. The story told here goes beyond the life of slavery as a legal institution, to the time after the Civil War when the nation struggled to determine the meaning of freedom for black Americans. It shows the ways that new systems of racial control came to replace the old rules of the slave system and how the system of legal segregation, called ‘Jim Crow’, came into existence in the South. According to Horton & Horton (in www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery), “The history of slavery is central to the history of the United

 

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States, and so this is also a story about the values and events that shaped American society. White Americans committed to freedom and God-given rights found it necessary to justify their economic system based on slavery. Some could not, and they became part of an enduring campaign to abolish slavery from the country and the world. Others rationalized the contradiction with theories of racial inferiority, arguing that black people were particularly wellsuited for enslavement, that they benefited from enslavement or that slavery was necessary for their control.” Although slavery was abolished nearly a century and a half ago, the racism rooted in the nation’s attempts to justify it remains with us today as the legacy of American slavery. References •

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Connors, Tiffany. "How the Emancipation Proclamation Worked." 07 March 2008. HowStuffWorks.com. 26 May 2009. Connors, Tiffany. "How the Emancipation Proclamation Worked." 07 March 2008. HowStuffWorks.com. 26 May 2009. Horton & Horton. “Slavery and the Making of America”. www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery >26 May, 2009 Lincoln and the struggle to abolish slavery. www.socialistworker_org.htm Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2008. © 1993-2007 Microsoft Corporation. Morton & Morton. www.slaveryinamerica.org/whats_new.htm Schloredt,V. & P. Brown. (1995). Martin Luther King:America’s great non-violent leader, who was murdered in the struggle for black rights. Hyderabad: Orient Longman Limited. Sproule, A. (1994). Abraham Lincoln: The United states president who abolished the curse of slavery in his country. New Delhi: Orient Longman Limited. www.biography_files\Martin Luther King - Biography.htm www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham Lincoln www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin Luther King www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in _United_States www.gutenburg.org www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery www.slaveryinamerica.org www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/overview.htm www.usconstitution.net/dream.html www.wikipedia.org/ free encyclopedia

 

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