Today I want to pass along a quote from Coretta Scott King, wife of slain civil-rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. Mrs. King was speaking at Lambda Legal’s 25th Anniversary Luncheon in 1998:
As Martin once said, ‘We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny… an inescapable network of mutuality… I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.’
Therefore, I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brother and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people. Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery, Selma, in Albany, Georgia, and St. Augustine, Florida, and many other campaigns of the civil rights movement. Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own, and I salute their contributions.
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Allies, Politics and Law
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Mombian YouTube Channel: Positive videos of LGBT families
dekerivers
on Jan 15th, 2007
@ 10:33 pm:
And I am utterly convinced that King would have firm words for those within the African-American community that do not understand their role, duty, and responsibility to fight today for others in securing civil rights. King would not be one of those who would pull the ladder up until everyone had made it to the ‘promised land’ of full civil rights.
It is the law of love that rules mankind at LesbianDad
on Jan 16th, 2007
@ 4:59 pm:
[...] I myself am disinclined to make direct comparison between oppressions, finding analogy is as close as one ought to venture, and then primarily as a means of comprehension. But when comparison is what one’s up to, the genocidal Middle Passage of Africans to America, two hundred fifty years of chattel slavery, and another hundred years of de jure discrimination stand alone in North American history. Yet for better or worse, a sanitized version of the BWMT statement now sits near the top of the Wikipedia entry on Ruskin, and for those whose knowledge of the man derives from E-Z online searching, it will become a defining statement. At least he is not alone among civil rights figures in drawing some connection between the two struggles: Coretta Scott King has been outspoken for quite some time (Mombian notes as much here; here’s another compendium on hatecrime.org). Dolores Huerta and Julian Bond are present and accounted for as well: Solmonese: How do you see our fight for equality — whether it’s in the workplace or in our everyday lives — as compared with the great civil rights movement that you and others ushered through in this country? [...]