The Burning Truth in the South

Progressive, The, Jan, 1999 by Martin Luther King, Jr.

An electrifying movement of Negro students has shattered the placid surfaces of campuses and communities across the South. Though confronted in many places by hoodlums, police guns, tear gas, arrests, and jail sentences, the students tenaciously continue to sit down and demand equal service at variety-store lunch counters and extend their protests from city to city. In communities like Montgomery, Alabama, the whole student body rallied behind expelled students and staged a walkout while state government intimidation was unleashed with a display of military force appropriate to a wartime invasion. Nevertheless, the spirit of self-sacrifice and commitment remains firm, and the state governments find themselves dealing with students who have lost the fear of jail and physical injury.

It is no overstatement to characterize these events as historic. Never before in the United States had so large a body of students spread a struggle over so great an area in pursuit of a goal of human dignity and freedom....

This movement is an expression of the longing of a new Negro for freedom and human dignity. These students were anchored to lunch-counter seats by the accumulated indignities of days gone by and the boundless aspirations of generations yet unborn.

In this new method of protest a new philosophy provided a special undergirding--the philosophy of nonviolence. It was first modestly and quietly projected in one community, Montgomery, when the threat of violence became real in the bus protest. But it burst from this limited arena and was embraced by masses of people across the nation with fervor and consistency.... The key significance of the student movement lies in the fact that from its inception, everywhere, it has combined direct action and nonviolence. This quality has given it the extraordinary power and discipline which every thinking person deserves. It has discredited the adversary, who knows how to deal with force but is bewildered and panicky in the face of the new techniques. Time will reveal that the students are learning lessons not contained in their textbooks. Hundreds have already been expelled, fined, imprisoned, and brutalized, and the numbers continue to grow. But with the punishments, something more is growing. A generation of young people has come out of decades of shadows to face naked state power; it has lost its fears, and experienced the majestic dignity of a direct struggle for its own liberation.

May 1960

Martin Luther King Jr., the slain civil-rights leader, wrote several times for The Progressive in the 1960s.