Here’s my piece at PunditWire in honour of THAT speech.

I thought I’d not say much about the speech as it speaks for itself, but instead look at the legal background to it. Notably Plessy v Ferguson, a case with far-reaching bad outcomes decided by the US Supreme Court in 1896:

Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation

Mr Justice Harlan dissented:

What can more certainly arouse race hate, what more certainly create and perpetuate a feeling of distrust between these races, than state enactments which proceed on the ground that colored citizens are so inferior and degraded that they cannot be allowed to sit in public coaches occupied by white citizens?

That, as all will admit, is the real meaning of such legislation as was enacted in Louisiana.

Thus to MLK:

67 years later Martin Luther King’s final message of hope, justice and – above all – the shared redemption of generosity soars out from the Lincoln Memorial, in a sentence 82 words long:

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last! Free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

Speechwriters! You can’t draft something like that, and you shouldn’t try. Cut the speaker free, to say what has to be said. As Clarence B. Jones says: “It was a transcendental experience to be there. It was like watching lightning captured in a bottle.”

Maybe the discredited Supreme Court majority in Plessy had a point? The state and the law have indeed stepped in to arbitrate everything to do with ‘racial’ distinctions, and that has surely helped lead to the very opposite of the shared redemption of generosity among far too many people today. See also Zimmerman, passim.