Tuesday, January 15, 2013

MLK and Changing Fear of Jail

Working my way through the papers of Louis Martin at the Library of Congress I ran across a perceptive observation that he made about Martin Luther King Jr.  As January 21 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I thought I would share it.
     Martin was a long-time editor of the Chicago Defender who worked later in the White House. In his unpublished memoirs, Martin said that King's attitude toward being jailed provided important inspiration to other African-Americans in the emerging civil rights movement. It was not that he would simply tolerate being locked up, but that he went willingly into a jail in the South.
     "For generations all blacks lived in mortal fear of jail," Martin wrote. "The sheriff and the police officers were the twenty-four hour enforcers of the doctrine of white supremacy and the legalized abrogation of the constitutional rights of black folks. The cop on the ghetto corner replaced the boos of the slave plantation for thousands and the sheriff and his posse were indistinguishable in many instances from the Klan leader and his lunch mob."

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