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.
Watergate is an immensely complicated scandal with a cast of characters as varied as a Tolstoy novel.
He was what I often think is a dangerous thing for a statesman to be - a student of history; and like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
[B]inary opposites fit nicely the formulation of history as written, but they do little to capture the messy, inchoate reality of history as lived.
America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.
The American Revolution was carried out in the name of the people, and it was supposedly 'We, the people,' who created the government that Americans still live under.
There is this tradition, stretching back to Tacitus and Plutarch, that history belongs to the heroes, the emperors. But I grew up among simple people, and their stories just shattered me. It was painful that no one but me was listening to them.
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