News Review, Monday 10 May, 2021

In a 22 December 1958 letter, Morehouse president Benjamin Mays invited King to address the graduating class of 1959; King accepted six days later. In these prepared remarks—his earliest known usage of this title—King invokes his common themes of anticolonialism and black self-respect.1 He places the domestic “social revolution" in a global context and urges the graduates of his alma mater to rise above the limits of “individualistic concerns,” submitting that all people are “caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality.”

News coverage of the speech indicates that King modified this handwritten text at several points. He advised his audience to adhere to nonviolence, for the "oppressors would be happy if black Americans “would resort to physical violence” and reminded them of progress already made: “We’ve broken loose from the Egypt of slavery . . . and we stand on the border of the promised land in integration.”2 King reportedly closed with a warning against inaction: “If you go home, sit down and do nothing about the revolution which we are witnessing you will be the victim of a dangerous optimism.”3

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that we are experiencing today one of the greatest revolutions that the world has ever known. Indeed there have been other revolutions, but they have been local and isolated. The distinctive feature of the present revolution is that it is worldwide. It is shaking the foundations of the east and the west. It has engulfed every continent of the world. You can hear its deep rumblings from the lowest village street to the highest intellectual ivory tower. Every segment of society is being swept into its mainstream. The great challenge facing every member of this graduating class is to remain awake, alert and creative through this great revolution.

Shared for historical purposes. I do not own the rights.

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⁣Stokely Carmichael - Free Huey! (1970)

Ted Vincent discusses Hubert H. Harrison, a socialist and Garveyite, who participated in the Harlem Renaissance, as well as Samuel Alfred Haynes, a Garveyite columnist with a noteworthy social consciousness.

On February 9, 2000 - Ponoko Rashidi speaks with Dr Edward Bynum and Dr. Clinton Crawford at Medgar Evers College as part of the Black History Month Event Series.

⁣Dr. Ivan Van Sertima - African Origins of Egyptian Civilization

Dr. Molefi Asante discusses his dream for a United States of Africa, a movement begun by Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first president. He will examine the prospect for an African Renaissance based on the idea of an African Federative Union and present the prospects and problems of a continental government in Africa.