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FREEDOMWAYS FIRST QUARTER 1972 unity. Anything short of that is divisive. Many people castigated King because he advocated integration. And so we went off in intel- lectual debates over whether it should be separatism or integration. Deal with it in '72-that's a moot question. If the scientists are pre- dicting that we're destroying the entire planet, that we're destroying our oxygen-producing mechanisms, if we may not even be alive twenty years from now, if what the scientists mean is that the curtain is fall- ing on act three in the big show, namely human life on the face of the earth, then isn't it absurd for us to continue to call each other "niggers" and "honkies," Communists and non-Communists, friends and foes? You see, because I wake up four o'clock in the morning sometimes thinking that we're going to still be on some street corner battling over who's a "nigger" and who's a "honky" and the lights are going to go out on all of us. And so the question is not whether we integrate or separate. The question is whether we have enough intelligence to unify without uniformity. The question is whether we have the ability to unify around the ultimate question that faces all of us-black, brown, red, yellow, white-the survival of human beings on the planet, because dig, you don't have to be white middle-class to breath bad air. And so if that's the ultimate question, then we're not talking about an academic debate. We're talking about the survival of human beings. If you can trace oil slicks to the North and South Pole, and the Lin- coln Memorial is deteriorating, what makes you think that your flesh and blood can stand up under what steel and concrete cannot? That's what King was talking about-the ultimate coming together of hu man beings. The man called King also made another very important statement -that generosity is more than throwing a few crumbs to a beggar, but dealing with the circumstances inherent in a society that gives rise to the development, the need and the perpetuation of a beggar. So what King said was, "To hell with expedient liberalism." We pit black against black, brown against brown, black against brown, against red, against yellow, poor against poor, all struggling over the crumbs in this country. So my politics are not the politics-nor were King's the politics of expedient liberalism, because the day is over when we fight each other over who gets the lion's share of the crumbs. it's a quesion of power You see Martin Luther King clearly understood that there is nothing inherently wrong in a human being who is poor. But there's some- 10
