THE OTHER AMERICA

BY TREMAYNE BAKER ,PD4

THE gOOd AMERICA

• During M.L.K’s speech he speaks of the good and the bad America “But I'd like to use as a subject from which to speak this afternoon, the Other America. And I use this subject because there are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful for situation. And, in a sense, this America is overflowing with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies; and culture and education for their minds; and freedom and human dignity for their spirits. In this America, millions of people experience every day the opportunity of having life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all of their dimensions. And in this America millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity”.

• In my own worlds he is talking about the good things/advantages that are in America.

THE bAd AMERICA

• Along with the good America M.L.K mentions the bad America.” But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the ebulliency of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America people are poor by the millions. They find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity”.

• Also in my own words this means that even thou America has its goods there are also some bad things like racism and poverty.

M.L.K’s VIEW ON RACIsM

• “In a sense this was a struggle for decency; we could not go to a lunch counter in so many instances and get a hamburger or a cup of coffee. We could not make use of public accommodations. Public transportation was segregated, and often we had to sit in the back and within transportation—transportation within cities—we often had to stand over empty seats because sections were reserved for whites only. We did not have the right to vote in so many areas of the South. And the struggle was to deal with these problems”.

How would you describe Dr. King's central message?

• To sum up what I want to say is “The interesting thing that he was able to do for all of us then -- and I think that he can still do for us now -- is that he wanted us to constantly be thinking about tomorrow. How do we envision what we are doing today and how that will affect generations after us and the future. And if we're not thinking about that, then we're not necessarily being responsible, because it's not just about us. It's about the health of our nation and the generations that will come after us. And he did that in Montgomery. And then you listen to him, when he's talking about the Vietnam War, and he's basically saying, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere.

• So he's constantly forcing us to realize that our individual acts or our collective acts all have repercussions or implications, and we have to consider those things and be responsible to that. That conscience is an important part of how we determine what we do every day. And the measure of our lives and the measure of the value of our lives is what we do every day. Not some days, not sometimes, but every day, all the time”.

How important was the Southern black church to Dr. King?

• In someone elses words makes this sound better” Dr. King was a child of the Southern black church, a child of the congregation. There were few places within the black community where you were immune, in a certain sense, to the pressures of the dominant white society -- where, in fact, you could become your own person. And if you came out of that environment, then you had a very strong sense of yourself, but at the same time you had a space where you were not dependent on the white community for your livelihood, for your stability, for your sense of self. You could then engage these difficult issues of segregation in the South and not feel the same kind of threat; you had the protection of that congregation also around you. It didn't mean that you weren't in danger, but you felt a little bit more bold, and I think there's a lot of strength that came from that environment.

• So yes, Dr. King and the church were extremely important, but at the same time he was, at the core, a man of God and a Christian. And these ethics and the tenets of that kind of belief were the things that were driving him. He used the words of the New Testament and the stories as a model for his teaching, and for ways to help convey to a lay audience how they had a basic right to the things that they were seeking”.

Why do you think King moved beyond the civil rights movement?

• “That whatever we do, we are constantly growing and changing. Dr. King is doing exactly that. He is obviously deeply disturbed by the clear inequity that segregation represented in America and how that was a real scar that America had to address. And with all of his energy, he got actively involved in ending segregation in the South. But as he began to work with everyday people around this, other issues became as clear to him, and as real, in terms of what America was and what he thought needed to change within America.

• And I think that as he moved from one campaign to the other, as he began to have a larger interaction with the nation as a whole, and then to have an interaction with how people saw us from outside of the United States -- getting the Nobel Prize, traveling to Europe, traveling to India, traveling to Africa -- and hearing about our country from other people's eyes, he began to see it differently as well. I think he began to see that there were larger issues that America needed to think about. And I think that's why his voice began to change at that time”.

THANKs 4 WATCHINg