Civil Rights

June 2020: Video - Rise of the Far Right: Dr. Larry Rosenthal in conversation with Bill Sokol.

The time James Baldwin told UC Berkeley that Black lives matter (Berkeley News article 2020 June 19) includes Baldwin's Jan. 15, 1979 speech at UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall Auditorium. It would be the second and final time he would speak at Berkeley prior to his death in 1987. The 27-minute speech, “On Language, Race, and the Black Writer,” was one of many scathing post-civil rights movement critiques Baldwin delivered throughout the country about the treatment of black people in America — poignant sentiments that, more than 40 years later, are still hauntingly relevant.

From Mother Jones newsletter 2020 June 11:

Fifty-seven years ago today, noted segregationist George Wallace—then of Alabama ...infamously stood in the schoolhouse door in an attempt to block two Black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending the University of Alabama. [https://www.npr.org/2003/06/11/1294680/wallace-in-the-schoolhouse-door] In response, President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard, which ordered Wallace to step aside.

Later that night, Kennedy addressed the nation. [https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/televised-address-to-the-nation-on-civil-rights] "One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves," the president said, adding:

"Yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free...

"Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or State or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.

"The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.

"We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is time to act in the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.

"It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the fact that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.

"Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality."