the ultimate measure of a man speech meaning

However, it was also a time of significant revolution and hope, with critical Civil Rights Movement leaders turning the tide closer towards true freedom for all. The mid-50s to late-60s was a time filled with pain, sorrow, and grief people of color throughout the US refused equal treatment for everything from the schools they could attend to the water fountains they got to use.

I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate restrooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.A bit of background on Dr. The first time that I was seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood. It was hard to understand why I could ride wherever I pleased on the train from New York to Washington and then had to change to a Jim Crow car at the nation’s capital in order to continue the trip to Atlanta. “After that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation. Then she said the words that almost every Negro hears before he can yet understand the injustice that makes them necessary: “You are as good as anyone.” She made it clear that she opposed this system and that I must never allow it to make me feel inferior. She tried to explain the divided system of the South-the segregated schools, restaurants, theaters, housing the white and colored signs on drinking fountains, waiting rooms, lavatories-as a social condition rather than a natural order. She taught me that I should feel a sense of “somebodiness” but that on the other hand I had to go out and face a system that stared me in the face every day saying you are “less than,” you are “not equal to.” She told me about slavery and how it ended with the Civil War. “My mother confronted the age-old problem of the Negro parent in America: how to explain discrimination and segregation to a small child. Our House First Time Home Buyer’s Series.

In His Own Words: Quotes from MLK on Transforming the World by Desegregating Your Mind - The Washington Informer Close

The ultimate measure of a man speech meaning