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FREEDOMWAYS                    FIRST QUARTER 1972

"Have you ever received any medical services from the House phy sician?" (We have doctors and nurses who take care of us, because we're important; we make important decisions, so our health is im portant.)
And he would say, "Yes."
"Has the gentleman ever received free medicine from the House physicians?"
"Yes."
"When the gentleman needed to be hospitalized at Walter Reed and Bethesda Hospital, did they treat you like a private, or a general, or beyond that?"
"The latter."
And I would then politely say, "I thank the gentleman. If that's not creeping socialism, what the hell is it?" But it's for the elite -for the elite.
You see, if freshman Congressman Ron Dellums tore up his "super- nigger" card that identifies me as a Congressman, walked out the west front door of Capitol Hill, and called a press conference on the steps and said, "Now that I have quit the Congress, give the masses of people all the benefits that I had as a Congressman," the front pages would say "Dellums goes out of his mind-plotting violent overthrow of the United States-insane revolutionary." You know it! But if I pasted up my card again and said, "I changed my mind," and walked back in, they would say, "All of the privileges that you had before are still yours, Congressman Dellums. They accrue to your station in life."
I'm trying to make a point to you. That every single thing that the masses of people are talking about, that newspaper headlines try to discredit as radical, revolutionary or militant, is something that some- body in this country has, somebody with enough power and enough money-the elite. So what we are about is no evil thing. We are about humanity. We are about life. We are about the quality of life. We are about living. And that's what Martin was about, not dying and death.
He taught me something else. Because when he died and I got over the emotionalism of his death, I then tried to deal politically and intellectually with the question of why he died when he did, and he didn't die when he led a quarter of a million civil rights troops in a March on Washington. My response to that is that when he led a quarter of a million troops in a March on Washington he didn't shake the foundation of this country. But when he put a black man

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-16 11:23:05