The Cross of Redemption Read Online Free PDF

crises we are undergoing now are involved with the fact that the habits of power are not only extremely hard to lose; they are as tenacious as some incurable disease. So that, for example, when I talk about “colonialism”—which is also a word that can be defined—it refers to European domination of what we now call underdeveloped countries. It also refers, no matter what the previous colonial powers may say, to the fact that these people entered those continents not to save them, not, no not, to bring the Cross of Christ or the Bible—though they did; that was a detail. And still less to inculcate into them a notion of political democracy. The truth is that they walked in and they stayed in, and they recklessly destroyed whatever was in their way, in order to make money. And this is what we call the rise of capitalism, which is a pre-phrase covering an eternity of crimes. If I try to point out to these people—and I’m not an African; I’ve never been to Africa; I’m talking only from my experience in this country and my experience of the West—if I point out that you cannot conceivably frighten an African by talking about the Kremlin, panic ensues, and I’m promptly called a Muslim.
    Now God knows I am not, I really am not, trying to accuse anybody of anything, and when I talk the way I apparently talk, it does not mean that Iam ready to go out and cut your head off, or dash your children’s heads against a stone. What I’m trying to say to this country, to us, is that we must know this, we must realize this, that no other country in the world has been so fat and so sleek, and so safe, and so happy, and so irresponsible, and so dead for twenty years. For twenty years. No other country can afford to dream of a Plymouth and a wife and a house with a fence and the children growing up safely to go to college and to become executives, and then to marry and have the Plymouth and the house and so forth. A great many people do not live this way and cannot imagine it, and do not know that when we talk about “democracy,” this is what we mean.
    Now I submit that if Mr. [John F.] Kennedy is the President of this country, and it is his country, and if Senator Eastland * can be responsible in this country, and it is his country—well, it’s my country too. And that means that it’s your country too. I do not believe in the twentieth-century myth that we are all helpless, that it’s out of our hands. It’s only out of our hands if we don’t want to pick it up. And the truth about us in this country is that we have evaded it for so long. The last cooling-off period relating to the Negro problem, as somebody put it, occurred during the Reconstruction, and we are paying for that now. It has escaped everybody’s notice that it doesn’t go back as far as the Civil War; it doesn’t go back any further than 1900. Those laws that we are trying to overthrow in this country now are not much older than I am. Faulkner says they are folkways, and one would think they came from Rome. But they came out of Southern legislatures just before the First World War. And they are no older than that. Now, if they can be put there, they can be taken away. One of the great confusions, again, is the nonsense that we hear about states’ rights. We hear this from people who have no concern with states’ rights, and still less with freedom, but who simply want to perpetuate a system which is doomed. The truth is that whether I like it or not is absolutely irrelevant. It is over. The sun did set on the British Empire, and there won’t be any more British gunboats down the Chinese rivers.
    I am trying to explain that I, speaking now again as a black man, have been described by you for thousands of years. And maybe I loved being described by you. But time passed, and now, whether I like it or not, I can not only describe myself but, what is much more horrifying, I can describeYOU! Now this is why, in this country which we call the leader of