But every month of that boycott, thousands and thousands more people started joining the White Citizens’ Council, all because Black people were not riding the bus, and they saw that as destabilizing.
Dr. King was articulating these things that people hadn’t articulated before, and he was challenging them. And when you listen to these speeches he gave, he would say at the mass meetings that we have to help our white brothers and sisters.
He said segregation is evil.
Archival clip of King: While living with the conditions of slavery and then, later, segregation, many Negroes lost faith in themselves. Many came to feel that perhaps they were less than human. Many came to feel that they were inferior.
Archival clip of King: This, it seems to me, is the greatest tragedy of slavery, the greatest tragedy of segregation: not merely what it does to the individual physically but what it does to one psychologically. It scars the soul of the segregated as well as the segregator. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority while leaving the segregated with a false sense of inferiority. And this is exactly what happened.
It was brilliant, but it was particularly enraging to the White Citizens’ Council because he was actually saying: Hey, white people, I’ve got something to help you, too.
That’s what made it so provocative. He was saying we need a new order. We need a new future.
Archival clip of King: With this faith, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace and brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s children — Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, Hindus and Muslims, theists and atheists — 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!”
That’s why, both in Christianity and in a lot of religions, there’s a message to the wealthy and the powerful and the privileged. It says: Woe to you, wealthy. Woe to you, privileged people. You have to think differently than your wealth and your privilege will push you to think. You have to think differently than your status will push you to think.
That’s something that some people of faith are embracing and using in very powerful ways, and that’s something that others are not.
