From Democracy Now archives, excerpting, editing by Carolyn Bennett
Writer, radio broadcaster, interviewer, chronicler Studs Terkel in 1964 conversation with social activist Martin Luther King
Studs Terkel:
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. happens to be passing through [Chicago]; traveling 275,000 miles a year, bringing a truth to people, now awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1964. We are seated at the [recovering] bedside of a mutual friend, Mahalia Jackson, the finest gospel singer in the world.… Dr. King, this dream you spoke of at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial last August (1963) — when did this dream of equity first come to you?
Dr. Martin Luther King:
“…This has always been my dream, as far back as I can remember. Even as a teenager growing up, I dreamed of a time that our nation would erase this ugly problem and that we would be able to live as brothers and that the Negro could walk the earth with dignity and self-respect. This has been a dream for many, many years now.
“The one thing I always remember, and always will remember about my father is the fact that racial segregation was an evil system … one that he was determined not to adjust to and that he did not allow his children to adjust to.
“He always taught us that we—even though we had to face the reality of the system— there was a sense of ‘somebodyness’ within us that always kept us moving toward the sense of dignity and self-respect that any human being should have.
ST: I’m thinking, of course, of how this hurts the white child, as well as the black child. The hurt, the separation —the hurt is to both … is it not?
MLK: It certainly is. Segregation injures the soul or the mind of the segregated — as well as the segregator. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority, and it so often leaves the segregated with a false sense of inferiority. It scars the soul of both.
ST: The jailer and the jailed … equally injured.
MLK : Yes, yes, exactly.
ST: Isn’t the phrase you used, ‘Hate hurts the hater as much as the hated’?
MLK: Yes, yes. Hate is a dangerous force, and it is an injurious force, because it injures the object of hate as well as the subject of hate. It injures the hater as well as the hated. This is why many are saying, ‘Love or perish.’
ST: I’m thinking about this element of the revolutionary aspects of love. When you went to Morehouse College under Dr. [Benjamin] Mays’ presidency, in your growth, in addition to your father, Thoreau played a role. …
MLK: …Thoreau played a very significant role when I first read his essay on ‘Civil Disobedience’ … that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.
Sources and notes
“Studs Terkel 1912-2008: A Democracy Now! Special Tribute to the Beloved Oral Historian and Broadcaster, November 27, 2008,” http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/27/studs_terkel_1912_2008_a_democracy
King
American social activist Martin Luther King, Jr. led the civil rights movement in the United States from the mid-1950s until his death by assassination in 1968. King, a Baptist minister, rose to national prominence through the organization of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, promoting nonviolent tactics among them the 1963 March on Washington to achieve civil rights. In 1964, Dr. King received a Nobel Prize for Peace.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (original name Michael Luther King, Jr., January 15, 1929, Atlanta, Georgia-April 4, 1968, Memphis, Tennessee), Britannica notes
[In] “Journey to Nonviolence,” Martin Luther King Jr. claimed that a commitment to nonviolence required overcoming the ‘internal violence’ of hatred and anger by cultivating love and compassion (King 1986, 46),” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pacifism/
Mays
Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays became president of Morehouse College (Atlanta, Georgia) in 1940 and in 27 years led the college to international prominence. Benjamin Mays was born August 1, 1894 near Epworth, South Carolina; he studied at and was degreed by Bates College in Maine and the University of Chicago; in the years 1921-1923, he pastored Atlanta’s Shiloh Baptist Church. Dr. Mays died in 1984, http://www.morehouse.edu/about/chapel/mays_memorial.html
Terkel
“Studs Terkel elevated the oral history of ordinary people to an art form, much as Mike Royko, who revived the newspaper column as urban literature, used common sense to deflate pompous politicians” — Perry R. Duis and Cathlyn Schallhorn, Britannica
“During the 1940s, Studs Terkel became a familiar voice on radio working as a news commentator and disc jockey. He also acted and appeared on several television programs. In 1949 Terkel began his own television show, Studs’ Place, an improvised sitcom where he played himself as a restaurant owner.
“After being investigated by [U.S. Senator] Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, his contract was cancelled. Terkel refused to give evidence against other left-wing activists and was therefore blacklisted and prevented from appearing on television. ‘I was blacklisted because I took certain positions on things and never retracted,’ Terkel said later, ‘I signed many petitions that were for unfashionable causes and never retracted.”
In 1934, he took a law degree at the University of Chicago and the following year he found work producing radio shows as part of the Federal Writers Project; he also became involved in the Chicago Repertory Theatre.
Louis (Studs) Terkel was born in the Bronx, New York, on May 16, 1912 and died in Chicago, Illinois, on October 31, 2008, http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAterkel.htm
Thoreau
“Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist whose major work, Walden, draws upon each of these identities in meditating on the concrete problems of living in the world as a human being. He sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a way of life, not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse. …
“Thoreau was an activist involved in the abolitionist movement on many fronts: he participated in the Underground Railroad, protested against the Fugitive Slave Law, and gave support to John Brown and his party. Most importantly, he provides a justification for principled revolt and a method of nonviolent resistance, both of which would have a considerable influence on revolutionary movements in the twentieth century. In his essay on ‘Civil Disobedience,’ originally published as ‘Resistance to Civil Government,’ he defends the validity of conscientious objection to unjust laws, which ought to be transgressed at once, ” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thoreau/
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