— by Hedrick Smith, ReclaimtheAmericanDream.org —
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. called to activism in the American Civil Rights Movement, in 1963
Washington – Back in the 1960s, when I was covering Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and other civil rights activists for The New York Times, I remember die-hard segregationists hurling an accusation at Dr. King that he was an “outside agitator.”
“You’re comin’ into our town,” they would bellow, whether it was Birmingham or Albany, Georgia or St. Augustine, Florida. “Things were quiet before you came to town. Our people were happy. But you come in here and stir up trouble. You’re agitating our people.”
They made it sound criminal – and in fact, they did arrest Dr. King several times.
Wondering how he would respond, I would go to those mass meetings that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference held in black churches all across the Deep South. And eventually, Dr. King would get around to the name-calling.
“Do You Know What an Agitator Is?”
“They call me an agitator,” he would cry out from the pulpit, his voice rising to put force and menace behind the indictment leveled against him. “Well, they’re right,” he came back defiantly. “I am an agitator.”
Then softening, he’d ask puckishly: “Do you know what an agitator is?” For a moment or two, he let the question hang in the air. People looked around at each other, uncertain.
(To read the full article, go to https://reclaimtheamericandream.org/MLK)
Excellent article, Hedrick. (I give Andrew Harvey the credit for the following words:
In order for us to be “agitators”most of us have our own personal work to do first. We will have to “be prepared to make radical sacrifices to our addictions to comfort – (our need to have what we want, when we want it, and how we want it. )We’ll have to overcome our narcissistic, self-absorbed materialism. We will have to overcome our individual terror of standing alone, of being singled out, of being rejected. We will have to stop wallowing in our own wounds and playing our old tapes of the past. – We will have to stop pouring our love and reverence for one another out onto the likes of Martin Luther King, the Dali Lama, Gandhi, etc and claim these gifts and abilities for ourselves.” We CAN do this..but it ain’t easy to “be that change we want to see in the world.”
Thank you indeed Nancy! It is time for courage to bubble to the surface and speak out to and for the world!
Spirit Eagle