Message to Obama: Follow MLK’s Miami Message

 “Let us realize that

history has thrust upon us an indescribably important destiny –to complete a

process of democratization which our nation has developed too slowly, but which

is our most powerful weapon for world respect.”

This might have come from Barack Obama’s Tuesday inaugural

address. It didn’t. America’s second most important black leader, Martin Luther

King Jr., spoke these words on Miami Beach almost exactly a half century ago.

That speech, one of two King doozies Riptide dug up from the Miami

area in the late 1950s,  is a monster.

He spoke to the American Jewish Congress at the Carillon hotel, which had long

prohibited blacks from sleeping in its elegant rooms. Indeed laws  forbade blacks from even being  on the Beach after 9 p.m.

Back then, Miami was a mecca for Jews in the South, which is why

King decided to address the American Jewish Congress here on May 14 1958.  The AJC and the ACLU had both recently opened

their first offices in the South here, to some degree to try and end

segregation. The city had also been dealing with a two-year long recession,

just as it is today.

King’s speech compares the Jews struggle against Hitler to black

efforts to end segregation. It sounds prophectic. “There are Hitlers loose in

America today [who]… as economic problems become more severe…will seek to

divert people’s minds and turn their frustrations and anger to the helpless, to

the outnumbered. Then whether the Negro and Jew shall live in peace will depend

upon how firmly they resist.”

The Obama administration has lots of challenges. Race is only

one. But the top guns would do well to listen to King’s description of the

Jewish/black partnership: “Our unity is born of our common struggle for

centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any

people by others an impossibility.”