veiled4allah

Yes!

A Time to Break Silence, by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

For the sixth year running, a tribute to some of the most important parts of Dr. King's legacy, which are usually overlooked. Here are some highlights of a speech given by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967. The speech is far too long for me to post here (even the excerpts that I've selected are quite long), but you can read it in its entirety here. I think Dr. King's words speak very eloquently to our situation today.

"A time comes when silence is betrayal." That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam. The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us... ...All the while the people read our leaflets and received regular promises of peace and democracy -- and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us -- not their fellow Vietnamese --the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go -- primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one "Vietcong"-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them -- mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children, degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers. What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?... ...What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts... ...Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours... ...If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we may bomb her nuclear installations. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horribly clumsy and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways... ...Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. n the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

What to the slave is the 4th of July, by Frederick Douglass

Bumped up from last year and will be as long as the words still need to be spoken The following is a speech given by Frederick Douglass (pictured at left) on July 4, 1841. It's a reminder that what makes America great is the ideals of liberty and justice that we stand for, and that we must always work to make sure that America lives up to our ideals. There are times when America has not done so. Slavery will forever remain a dark blot on our record. When we see America doing wrong, we need to speak up as Douglass did to set it right. I post this as a reminder that sometimes the most patriotic act, the one that shows the most love, is to criticize. No, America is not doing anything today that approaches slavery for its injustice, but there are things happening in this country, laws being made, actions being taken, that take us away from our ideals. I have spoken up against these laws and actions and will continue to do so because I want us to turn back from this path before we have gone very far down it. Without further ado, here's Frederick Douglass:

Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us? Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that the dumb might eloquently speak and the lame man leap as an hart. But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn that it is dangerous to copy the example of nation whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrevocable ruin! I can today take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people. "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! We wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth." Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! Whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorry this day, "may my right hand cleave to the roof of my mouth"! To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then, fellow citizens, is American slavery. I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing there identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine. I do not hesitate to declare with all my soul that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July! Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery – the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse"; I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, shall not confess to be right and just ... For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not as astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, and secretaries, having among us lawyers doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; and that, while we are engaged in all manner of enterprises common to other men, digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshiping the Christian's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave, we are called upon to prove that we are men!... What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.... What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour. Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms – of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

the passing of Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks, icon of the Civil Rights Movement has died. Some good articles about her role and her influence include: Her Act of Courage Changed a Nation What Rosa Parks Gave America The Triumph and Tragedy of Rosa Parks The struggle is still far from over, but we can also look back and see how far we've come.

racism, slavery, and Arabs

I haven't been posting to this blog the last couple of days, but I've been having an interesting discussion in the comments section of Prometheus 6, about racism among Arabs. As part of this discussion, I dug through brother P6's archives to find an article he posted a long time ago about Black Iraq. Even longer ago than that, I had posted some information in my own comments section about slavery in the Muslim world. Be sure to read all the way down.

slavery

August 23 is the International Day for Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition. Some reading: Slavery in the Muslim world African Muslims enslaved in the Americas Slavery and exploitation are still with us The next best thing to slaves: The prison-industrial complex

Juneteenth

June 19th is Juneteenth, the anniversary of the end of slavery in the United States. Head on over to Prometheus 6 to learn more: Juneteenth A little more context

strange fruit

Billmon looks back on America's shameful history of lynching (note: entry contains graphic pictures of lynching). He notes:

However, it shouldn't be necessary -- but apparently is -- to point out that the destruction and, yes, savage mutilation of other human beings isn't a uniquely Iraqi, or Arab or Islamic spectator sport. And we don't need to visit the killing fields of Bosnia or El Salvador to find the proof. It's tucked away in the attic of our own national memory. And it isn't all that dusty, either... ...Now to my eyes, at least, the participants in this particular public atrocity don't appear to be either Arab or Muslim. Interestingly enough, they're not even white Southerners. This 1919 snapshot was snapped in Duluth, Minnesota -- peaceful, tolerant, Scandinavian Minnesota. And somebody liked the picture so much they turned into a postcard... ..."Having a lovely time. Wish you were here." This is fitting, in a way, since murdering people with dark skins -- plus the occasional Jew or labor organizer -- remained a popular form of American light entertainment deep into the 20th century:

At its height at the turn of the century, two to three people, mostly southern blacks, were lynched every week. Railroads ran special excursion trains to lynching sites, and thousands gathered to watch the beating, hanging, and burning of human beings. Spectators brought cameras and vendors printed photographs on the spot, minting a small fortune by turning the prints into souvenir postcards. Some of those photographs are now part of a new exhibit at the New York Historical Society, and what they show is the shameless, festive carnival of lynching: Women with parasols, children lifted onto shoulders for the view, and large groups of men, all expectant and exultant.

You can find more memorabilia from that not-so-distant era at the online version of the same exhibit, Without Sanctuary. But be warned: Some of the photos are every bit as graphic as anything you'll find on Yahoo News from today's massacre in Fallujah. All told, an estimated 2,500 Americans, most of them African-Americans, were lynched over the 55-year period between the end of Reconstruction and the Great Depression. In her 1992 book, A History of Lynching in the United States, historian Jana Evans Braziel did the math: "the scale of this carnage means that, on the average, a black man, woman, or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, between 1882 and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob."...

To learn more about the history of lynching see The New "Lynching" by Lilith Devlin (contains a number of graphic photos) and Strange fruit (also contains a graphic picture) and A historical note by David Neiwert. David, Billmon, and I all called our entries "Strange Fruit". Why? This Billie Holiday song:

Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. Pastoral scene of the gallant south, The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, Then the sudden smell of burning flesh. Here is fruit for the crows to pluck, For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop, Here is a strange and bitter crop.

cross burned at black man's home in Washington state

This story caught my eye since it's sort of local:

A cross was burned on the front lawn of a black minister in the middle of the night following threats to his son at school. The 3-by-5-foot cross held together with duct tape was discovered about 2 a.m. Wednesday, Police Chief John L. Gray said. Firefighters doused the flames... ...The Rev. Jason Martin, 38, pastor of a Pentecostal congregation in Marysville, said he moved into the neighborhood with his wife and six children 17 months ago. He said he wasn't afraid, but "I'm very concerned for my children." Last year, he said, a student at Arlington High School threatened one of his sons by saying he would blow up the family's house, and last week someone deliberately drove a car over the lawn. "I think it's because of race," he said. "We're one of the only black families in this community." According to the 2000 census, slightly more than 1 percent of Arlington's 12,000 residents are black...

Since when would a cross-burning not be about race? Update: Brother P6 has an update on this case. As I noted in his comments section, it's a conceit of white liberals that racism is not a problem in the greater Seattle area. We think that all the white surpremacists are over in Eastern Washington with the militia groups. They're not. There are plenty of racists unaffiliated with any group, and there are also some white supremacist groups that have set up shop in this area in recent years.

Islamic reflections on Black History Month

Zaid Shakir, a well-respected African-American Muslim leader, wrote about Black History Month, which drew to a close today. I received this by email. Here's the opening:

Black History Month should be of interest to every Muslim –especially here in America. It is estimated that upwards to 20% of the Africans enslaved in the Americas were Muslim.[1] In some areas, such as the coast of the Carolinas, Georgia, and parts of Virginia, the percentages of Muslims in the slave population may have approached 40%.[2] The fact that the search of a random African American, Alex Haley, for his roots led him to a Muslim village in West Africa is indicative of the widespread Muslim presence among the enslaved population here in the Americas. At this critical time in the history of our country, it is important for Muslims, whose legitimate existence in this country is being challenged in some quarters, to connect to our American Muslim roots. As Muslims, our story in this country did not begin with the coming of Syrians, Lebanese, Albanians, or Yemenis at the turn of the 20th Century and later. It began with those courageous African Muslim slaves whose blood, sweat, and tears were instrumental in building this country. Their struggle is our struggle, and our struggle should be a continuation of theirs.

Continue reading the rest in the extended entry.