EXCLUSIVE: Rarely Seen Film “King: A Filmed Record” Traces MLK’s Struggle from Montgomery to Memphis
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: It has been moved and seconded that the resolution as read will be received and adopted. Are you ready for the question? All in favor, let it be known by standing on your feet.
That was the day that we started a bus protest which literally electrified the nation, and that was the day when we decided that we were not going to take segregated buses any longer. And, you know, when we planned the bus boycott, we said if we could just get about 50 or 60 percent of the Negroes of Montgomery not to ride buses, this would be an effective boycott. I think that whole day we found eight Negroes on the buses. And from that day on, that boycott was more than 99.9 percent effective.
I remember that Monday morning when I was subpoenaed to be in court, the chief defender. Many things ran through my mind. And I started thinking about the people, all day long trying to think of something to say to the people. Finally, I arrived to the pulpit. My words were fumbling a bit.
Let us fight passionately and unrelentingly for the goals of justice and peace. Let’s be sure that our hands are clean in the struggle. Let us never fight with falsehood and violence and hate and malice, but always fight with love, so that when the day comes that the walls of segregation have completely crumbled in Montgomery, that we will be able to live with people as their brothers and sisters.
And I say to you, my friends, rise up and know that as you struggle for justice, you do not struggle alone, but God struggles with you. Freedom is never given to anybody, for the oppressor has you in domination because he plans to keep you there, and he never voluntarily gives it up. And that is where the strong resistance comes. We’ve got to keep on keeping on, in order to gain freedom. It is not done voluntarily, but it is done through the pressure that comes about from people who are oppressed. Privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong resistance.
KLAN SPEAKER: They want to throw white children and colored children into the melting pot of integration, through out of which will come a conglomerated mulatto mongrel class of people.
AMY GOODMAN: A member of the Ku Klux Klan.
KLAN SPEAKER: Both races will be destroyed in such a movement. I, for one, under God, will die before I’ll yield one inch for that kind of a movement.
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: I want young men and young women who are not alive today but who will come into this world with new privileges and new opportunity, I want them to know and see that these new privileges and opportunity did not come without somebody suffering and sacrificing for them.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. King’s church and his house was bombed in Montgomery, Alabama.
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: The executive board of the Montgomery Improvement Association recommends that the 11-month-old protest against the city buses will be called off and that the Negro citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, will return to the buses on a non-segregated basis. It is further recommended that this return to the buses will not take place until the mandate from the United States Supreme Court is turned over to the federal district court.
AMY GOODMAN: That was November of 1955.
REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: We have the assurance from authentic sources that this mandate will come to Montgomery in a matter of just a few days. For those three or four days, we will continue to walk and share rides.
