What Martin Luther King Jr, recognised about his country that day had begun long before the ancestors of our ancestors had taken their first breaths. Martin Luther King Jr visiting India in 1959. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in the US. Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for – 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in the US for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.Īnd 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 realised that the land of the free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India, and that he had lived under that system all of his life.
“For a moment,” he later recalled, “I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.” He did not see the connection, did not see what the Indian caste system had to do directly with him, did not immediately see why the lowest-caste people in India would view him, an American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as low-caste like themselves, see him as one of them. He had flown in from another continent, and had dined with the prime minister. He had not expected that term to be applied to him. “Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.” At one point in their trip, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city of Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high-school students whose families had been untouchables.
Wherever he went, the people on the streets of Bombay and Delhi crowded around him for an autograph. He discovered that people in India had been following the trials of his own oppressed people in the US, and knew of the bus boycott he had led.
0 kommentar(er)
