Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shore, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. 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 feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it. Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.
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About Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a 20th-century American civil rights activist. Martin Luther King Jr. was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister who was a leader of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. Read more on Wikipedia →
Themes
- History — Lessons from the past and the arc of human civilisation