No, for anyone who might be confused by the title, our brother Martin is not the humbug, and I am not a troll. The humbugs are the Scrooges of our day. The Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Mitch McConnell, Eric Cantor, Pat Robertson, Joe Lieberman, Ann Coulter, Michelle Bachmann, Chuck Grassley, Joe Wilson Scrooges, and all the others who pretend that the richest country in the world can't afford to give all of its people the education and health care needed to create the proverbial level playing field.
Martin gave the most direct condemnation of the Scrooges of his time just before the famous part of his 1963 I Have a Dream speech, the part that doesn't get played much, or taught in school. That's the Bad Check part.
In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
What is this fierce urgency of now that brother Martin spoke of and brother Barack echoed? It has become a fierce urgency of then, 47 years ago, a promise forgotten and betrayed by 47 more years of Southern obstinacy, hatred, and lies, following upon centuries of greed, obstinacy, hatred, and lies. It is like the Red Queen's promise of jam every other day to Lewis Carroll's Alice: "Jam yesterday, and jam tomorrow, but never jam today."
The Bible says
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's. (Exodus 20:17)
But the slavers coveted their neighbor, his and her bodies in the fields and in bed, their labor, their descendants' bodies and labor, world without end. The descendants of the slavers have not given up their claims to be better and more worthy than the descendants of those chattels held in grievous bondage, and to owe those descendants nothing out of all that their ancestors' labors built.
The slavers' churches told the slavers' children that God had instituted slavery, and therefore no man could prevent it; that it was the fault of Ham, cursed in himself and all of his descendants for some unidentified sin; and that slavery was good for the savage African, who was happy in slavery. Feh! Humbug isn't in it. This goes far beyond humbug to crimes against humanity.
And this is what the Republican Party has stood for since 1964, when Jackie Robinson said that going to their convention showed him what it was like for Jews in Hitler's Germany. Their reply to Martin's call for simple justice was to harden their hearts to Blacks and to Lyndon Johnson, like Pharaoh in the book of Exodus to Jews and to Moses.
When Israel was in Egypt's land: Let my people go,
Oppress'd so hard they could not stand, Let my People go.
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt land,
Tell old Pharaoh,
Let my people go.
The Old South gave many of its first-born sons to die in the Civil War (which they call The War of Northern Aggression) before the slaves had to be let go, and sent another army of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan after them to bring them back to slavery (as share-croppers). The Klan has not drowned in the Red Sea, but rather in the passage of time, as Southern children gradually fell away from the delusions of their fathers and mothers.
We have had 47 years of gradualism, but now we are fast approaching a fiercely urgent tipping point where the Old South is dying away, where the majority even in Alabama and Mississippi is ready to rejoin the Union and the world, as soon as we can pry the hands of the current crop of Old White Boys Club members from the levers of state and Senate power. (Actually, as the Old White Boys die off and the Mad Tea Party of No goes into terminal decline, to be replaced by people more representative of today's populations.)
It is not only Blacks and Progressives who feel the fierce urgency of now. The shrieking of the Mad Tea Parties expresses the fierceness of their centuries-old delusions of grandeur and the urgency of privileges about to be lost forever. The Scrooges are out in force right now. That, following brother Gandhi, is how we know that we are winning.
First they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
This is the third major round in the fight, after the Civil war of the 1860s and the Civil rights movement of the 1960s, and continuous work before, between, and after. The Old South is going down for the third time, and the Young South is Ours.
We are 47 years late in answering Martin's call for justice, for the cashing of the promissory note from the Founders for Freedom for all, but it is never too late for justice. It is never too late for repentance, for accepting our responsibilities, for stepping up to the problem and facing it down.
Which particularly includes getting out the vote this year to take a few more Senate seats and Governorships from the Republicans and the Blue Dogs. There are more Democrats than Republicans now, and we raise more money for campaigns. Only the complacency of those like Martha Coakley's campaign advisors in Massachusetts or those running away from brother Barack like Creigh Deeds in Virginia holds us back.