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FREEDOMWAYS    THIRD QUARTER 1973

Luther King, Jr. One of the giants of our history, Martin Luther King, an Hegelian philosopher, made a major contribution with his emphasis that the preacher must concern himself with the material needs of the people, as well as their spiritual needs; and as we all know he lived out that creed. "There is nothing I like to see more than a relevant ministry," he said in his speech to the garbage workers the night before his assassination. "It's alright for a preacher to preach about the 'new Jerusalem'. . . but God's preacher must concern himself with the struggle for the new Chicago, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee." Martin Luther King represented a continuity of the finest in the two centuries old revolutionary tradition of the Negro Church and whole strata among the clergy, of all denominations and nationalities, responded to his example. 

Every movement that grows out of struggle experiences its periods of upsurge and its periods of ebbing; and the last several years demonstrate conclusively that our Movement is not immune to these laws of motion and change. Nor is it unusual that out of disappointment, unfulfilled hopes and in some cases just plain fatigue some would incline towards being cynical and still others to seek sanctuary from reality, in one or another variety of mysticism. This is all "par for the course" for it is the material conditions of life that generate these temporary aberrations. There are those who sought relief from frustration and perhaps some short-lived popularity by engaging in super-black rhetoric as a substitute for the hard work that goes into building an organized mass movement. This is a style that has met with predictable failure. It is a mistake which had its roots in the absence of any solid grounding in scientific theory, the source of theory being the practical experience which can be generalized to serve the Movement.

In the last several years we have seen both substantial decline in racism among large sections of the white American population and at the same time efforts to rescue and revitalize this unscientific ideology by crystallizing it in new forms. The latter is a fresh reminder of the basic intransigence of the super-rich class that runs this country and of the general social backwardness of the new canservative [[conservative]] White American Majority. The masses of whites, too, are being encouraged, through a deluge of subtle social propaganda, to find their escapes from reality. One of the major forms of this is the mass "nostalgia" for the good-ole-days of the sterile 1950's decade and there is no doubt that some of them have a nostalgia for the eighteen-fifties.

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