Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., perhaps the most transformative visionary in American history, would have been 95 years old today. He devoted his life to what he ultimately realized was a caste system in his own country, which has tragically reasserted itself in our era of rupture.
How reassuring it was, before my trip to India, to learn from the archives of the King Institute at Stanford that Dr. King had made this connection during his own historic trip to India.
It was exactly 65 years ago next month that he and Coretta Scott King journeyed to the land of Gandhi, the inspiration for nonviolent protest, and visited a school for students then known as untouchables, now known as Dalits.
The principal introduced Dr. King. “Young people,” the principal said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”
Dr. King was floored.
“For a moment,” he would later recall, “I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.”
Then he thought about the lives of the people he was fighting for—20 million souls consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.
And he said to himself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.”
In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not that far removed from the caste system of India and that it lurked beneath the forces he was fighting in America.
He later described this awakening in his 1965 Fourth of July sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
India had a profound effect. “These experiences,” he said, “will remain dear to me as long as the cords of memory shall lengthen.”
Listen to his stirring voice as he recounts hearing ‘caste’ applied to him and how he came to the recognition of the applicability of this ancient concept to understanding our country.
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Video clip from my Aug 2020 interview about Caste, with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.
To watch in full: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o3C1HItZI8k
#history #caste #MLK #MLKDay | Posted on 16/Jan/2024 00:26:31
