Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. ... We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the dark history of America's treatment of Native Americans, emphasizing a need for acknowledgment and remorse.
In this quote, Martin Luther King, Jr. addresses the horrific legacy of genocide against Native Americans, stating that the United States was founded upon the belief of racial superiority that justified the extermination of indigenous peoples. He underscores the hypocrisy of glorifying this brutal chapter as a noble endeavor and highlights the ongoing refusal to confront and regret this shameful history, urging a critical reflection on the past and its implications for present and future generations.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about racial injustices in history classes.
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
Music is the best consolation for a despaired man
We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.
We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
Israel... is one of the great outpost of democracy in the world
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
There are some places where history just grabs you by the jugular. This is one of them.
Glory to God in the highest, Ohio has saved the Nation.
From the very beginning, history wasn't content simply to be nostalgic fairytales; it wanted to make you think.
The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.
We have a long, ugly history of white supremacy in this country, ranging from Jim Crow laws to keep African Americans down to the 1924 Immigration Act to keep non-Europeans out.
Apart from the intrinsic interest of the complex system of beliefs the Puritans carried with them, their lives give a clue to what it meant at the beginning to be American. And the level of scholarship dealing with them has reached a point where it can address the human condition itself.
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