‘Lincoln. King, JFK, LBJ , Muhammed Ali, and other topics’ by Donal Kennedy

It’s nearly fifty three years since Martin Luther King stood by the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and gave a brilliant, classically constructed and incontrovertible speech ending with the rousing “I have a Dream” .  To read just the ending is as childish as eating the icing of a cake and ignoring the cake itself.

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln had made a proclamation emancipating forever all slaves in territories in rebellion against the United State, territoriesnot then under the control of the Federal Government. Lincoln invoked his Office as Commander in Chief of the Forces to make Proclamation as a War Measure. Under the Constitution slaves were property and he had no authority to alienate property legally held within the states and territory not in rebellion.

King’s 1963 speech was made to a huge crowd who had marched on Washington to demand Civil Rights. He and some other leaders visited the White House before it and were received in the Oval Office. Film of the meeting can be accessed on YOU TUBE and it is very revealing. JFK and LBJ are both shown keeping their hands behind their backs as if physical contact with black men would lethally infect them.

That was the context of Cassius Clay’s conversion to The Nation of Islam which preached segregation from white people, all of whom were painted with a racist brush. Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Rastafarians, believed all black people should return to Africa, because he and many of his colour had suffered at white hands. The growrh of Zionism from the Dreyfus Affair and Tsarismand Nazism was fuelled by similar experiences.

Kennedy had been murdered four years before, and a Civil Rights Act passed, during LBJ’s Presidency three years before Hollywood dared to produce a supposedly “liberal” film on Black-White relationships -“Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?”  It featured Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn as upper-middle class progressive liberals whose daughter was bringing her boyfriend to meet them, a distinguished man, I think with a Nobel Prize and the sanctity of a St. Francis of Assisi, played by Sidney Poitier. Their dilemma? Should their bog-standard, average, lily-white daughter be allowed associate with that paragon. Finally the parents were happy for her

to marry the man provided he took his black ass to Hell out of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Not since Shylock had to renounce Judaism to save his life has there been such a contemptible end to a drama. James Baldwin, in despair, asked what hope would that give to a black high-school drop-out.

A few years ago I read “From Mississippi  to Madrid” by James Yates. His description of his childhood and youth in Mississippi specifically and of the South generally is of a Hell for black people. Maya Angelou’s description of North Carolina in “I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings” convinces me that neither she nor Yates were lying. Yates worked on the trains to and from Chicago and was tempted with following Marcus Garvey’s segregationist line, but on reflection joined the American Communist Party and fought with the International Brigade inthe Spanish Civil War. He was a founder member of National Association for the Advancement ofColored People and an advocate of Civil Rights for all, Incidentally he recalled how an Irish shopkeeper in Mississippi supplied firearms to blacks when a white lynch mob was forming, and thus saved many lives. In Spain he encountered Frank Ryan, a former IRA officer who served as an officer with the International Brigade and he wrote highly of him.

By the time Muhammed Ali visited Dublin in 1972 he had rejected the segregationist stance of a few years before and specifically praised Ireland’s long struggle for freedom and equality.

OTHER TOPICS –

THE TIMES (of London) frequently gets me thinking. On Saturday, June 11 it carried a headline –

“Dirty foreign money could be paying school and university fees”.

 

I believe that when it paid Richard Pigott for his forgeries he used some of the money to pay his son’s fees at Clongowes. I’d like to think

the school returned the dirty money to Pigott or to the paper. But I’d be very reluctant to bet on it.

It’s just occurred to me a Brexit vote would be no novel thing.. After all. Ireland repeatedly voted for Brexit.

First in dribs and drabs, in by-elections in 1917. Then by landslide victories in the 1918 General Election, municipal, county council

and other local elections in 1920 and general elections in 1921.  All of which appear to have been overlooked by university scholars.

But the question begs itself – WHAT PART OF FUCK OFF DO BRITISH GOVERNMENTS NOT UNDERSTAND?

 

A supplementary question , if Britain votes for Brexit  will the European Union ignore the vote and send EURO ‘TANS TO MURDER THE VOTERS?

 

And will Britain appreciate  IMITATION AS THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY?