Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in Sacramento in 1967. Here’s what he said
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- MLK addressed Sacramento State in 1967, urging nonviolence and equality.
- He challenged white myths, arguing laws restrain violence and shape hearts.
- He criticized bootstrap rhetoric and demanded white society share political power.
While we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. day Monday with the annual “March for the Dream” and other events, we can also reflect in many ways what the civil rights leader touched and shaped lives. Some of those were in attendance at a speech in Sacramento 59 years ago.
King spoke to a stadium crowd of more than 6,0000 at what was then Sacramento State College, on Oct. 16, 1967, passionately advocating for non-violence and equality. He would be assassinated less than six months later in Memphis, Tennessee.
We peered back into the archives of The Sacramento Bee and found the account of that speech. In honor of his memory, we thought would present excerpts that would, in one small way, help capture a moment, its meaning and one sliver of the MLK legacy.
From our story
- He said the civil rights movement has changed from one seeking an end to legal segregation to a movement seeking genuine equality in America.
- Before “white society” which has caused the darkness in our nation” achieves this equality it must rid itself of its myth about black society, he said.
- “Progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability,” he added.
- Another myth, he said, often articulated in white society, is that legislation cannot change people’s hearts. King, who said that as a Baptist minister he is in the “heart-changing business,” said that morality cannot be legislated but that behavior can be regulated.
- “Laws cannot make a man love me but they can restrain him from lynching me,” he said, adding that hearts will change within the legislative process.
- Another myth in white society, King asserted, is its overreliance on the “bootstrap philosophy.”
- No mention is made, he said, of the fact these other ethnic groups were not installed in the nation as slaves, did not suffer from a difference in skin color and that, actually, no ethnic group ever has lifted itself up by its own bootstraps.
- He added that in the West at the same time millions of acres of land were given away to members of white society, land grant colleges were established to teach them how to use the land, they were given low-interest rates on federal loans to farm and now are given federal subsidies not to farm.
- “The long, hot summers caused by “winters of delayed justice,” he said, will not be ended until white society shares its political power ...”
