Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Give Us The Ballot

[Wilms]

Give Us The Ballot

By Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.



January 15, 2007

The following passage is excerpted from a speech that Dr. King delivered before the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington, on May 17, 1957, three years after Brown v. Board of Education and eight years before the enactment of the Voting Rights Act.

snip

Give us the ballot and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.

Give us the ballot and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the southern states and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.

Give us the ballot and we will transform the salient misdeeds of blood-thirsty mobs into calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.

Give us the ballot and we will fill our legislative halls with men of good will, and send to the sacred halls of Congressmen who will not sign a Southern Manifesto, because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice.

Give us the ballot and we will place judges on the benches of the South who will "do justly and love mercy," and we will place at the head of the southern states governors who have felt not only the tang of the human, but the glow of the divine.

snip

http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=743&Itemid=26

[galloglas]

1. It is amazing what sticking to your principles can do...

King, Mandela, Gandhi, and how many others passed the "last test" by refusing to co-operate with corrupt governments.

When the "Great Revolutionaries" are about to prevail, they always face the final test of corruptibility. It is almost as if the have to pass the Dr. Faustus test.

[kster]

2. Give us the Ballot, then we will count those ballots

out in the open for ALL to witness, thats what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, would more than likely be saying today, if he knew the facts of what is going on, in this country, with the secret vote counting machines. K&R

[kster]

3. Oo late to Reco, good thread..nt