AP Success - AP US History: DBQ African American Civil Rights Movement

That’s our motto. We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary. We don’t feel that in 1964, living in a country that is supposedly based upon freedom, and supposedly the leader of the free world, we don’t think that we should have to sit around and wait for some segregationist congressmen and senators and a President from Texas in Washington, D. C., to make up their minds that our people are due now some degree of civil rights. No, we want it now or we don’t think anybody should have it.

This country is too hypocritical; and we cannot adjust ourselves to its hypocrisy. The only time I hear people talk about nonviolence is when black people move to defend themselves against white people. Black people cut themselves every night in the ghetto - don't anybody talk about nonviolence. Lyndon Baines Johnson is busy bombing the hell out of Vietnam - don't nobody talk about nonviolence. White people beat up black people every day - don't nobody talk about nonviolence. But as soon as black people start to move, the double standard comes into being. You can't defend yourself- - that's what you're saying. 'Cause you show me a man who advocates aggressive violence that would be able to live in this country. Show him to me.

It's necessary to boycott sometimes, but the nonviolent resistor realizes that a boycott is never an end within itself. It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor, but the end is reconciliation. The end is redemption. So the aftermath of violence is bitterness, but the aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community. The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption and reconciliation. This is a method that seeks to transform and to redeem and win the friendship of the opponent, and make it possible for men to live together as brothers in a community and not continually live with bitterness and friction.

We ain’t going to fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary. We’re going to organize, dedicate ourselves to the revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the structure of that power. Arm ourselves. All right, we have to arm ourselves and we’re going to fight reactionary pigs with the international proletarian revolution. Excuse me, let me say that one more time. I said we’re going to fight reactionary pigs with the international proletarian revolution, that’s what it’s got to be. The people have to have the power. The people belong with the power.

During that 10-year period – '55, beginning with the Montgomery bus protests . . . A demonstration, carried on non-violently, was capable of calling attention to the absence of dignity . . . and simultaneously could change that institution. If you had 50 Negroes who were willing to sit in the restaurant, go to jail, be beaten, have cigarette ends stuffed down their neck, have their hair clipped, have their hair burned, if they would merely sit, that institution, that restaurant could be changed in a few days.
However, after Birmingham, where Dr. King asked for what we now refer to as the package deal – we want full employment, we want the slums destroyed, we want all Negro children to get a decent education. Even so simple a thing as that, in Birmingham, we want the truant officer to see that Negro student go to school as well as white, and that they go to decent schools. When Dr. King raised those questions, of jobs, of quality integrated schools, and of the destruction of slums, the Negro so-called revolt had now moved toward a critique of the basic institutions of the country, which no demonstration could, simultaneously, call attention to and correct.

You may well ask, "Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.

So it's the, it's the ballot or the bullet. Today, our people can see that we're faced with a government conspiracy. This government has failed us. The senators who are filibustering concerning your and my rights, that's the government. Don't say it's southern senators, this is the government. This is a government filibuster. It's not a segregationist filibuster, it's a government filibuster. Any kind of activity that takes place on the floor of the Congress or the Senate, that's the government. Any kind of dilly-dallying, that's the government. Any kind of pussy-footing, that's the government. Any kind of act that's designed to delay or deprive you and me, right now, of getting full rights, that's the government that's responsible. And anytime you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil rights of a people in 1964, then you are wasting your time going to that government expecting redress. Instead you have to take that government to the world court and accuse it of genocide and all of the other crimes that it is guilty of today.