via 28 Days of Black
There’s no way around it. The Black community is facing crisis. We know the headlines. Black unemployment is at its highest, and climbing. Our health, education, and economic statistics continue to occupy the bottom rung on any ladder to success. The truth is, we can turn this around with our buying power! Our collective income has reached $1 trillion a year, but only 2-to-5 percent of that reaches Black-owned businesses today. Studies show that when Black businesses thrive, so do Black communities.
CLICK HERE | MORE INFO
Martin Luther King, Jr’s Speech at Bennett College 1958
“We don’t have time to spend a lot of money on whiskey and big parties and a lot of stuff, and we aren’t giving money to the basic causes that confront us now.
It will be an indictment on the Negro if it is revealed that we spend more money on frivolities than we spend on the cause of freedom and justice.
And I’ve been in situations where I’ve seen us in many of our social groups, our fraternities and our Masonic and our Elks and what have you, spending more money on frivolities than we spend on the cause of freedom and justice!
I remember one year that a certain fraternity assembled with other fraternities and spent in one week $500,000 on whiskey!
That’s what the paper reported.
Negroes spend more money in one week, just a handful, in one week than the whole Negro race spent that whole year for the NAACP and the United Negro College Fund.
Now that’s tragic.
That’s tragic, my friends.
We’ve got to get a sense of values.
Now you don’t like some of these things I’m saying.
You’re not saying amen too much right through in here, but I’m saying things that I think are basic for us.
Things that are basic. Not only that, we must continue to develop wise, courageous, and
sincere leadership.
This is a need all over the South and all over the nation. We need leaders who are sincere.
Leaders of integrity.
Leaders who are intelligent.
Leaders who avoid the extremes of hot- headedness and Uncle Tomism.
Leaders who somehow have the vision to see the issues and have the courage to stand there.
Leaders not in love with money, but in love with humanity.
Leaders not in love with publicity, but in love with justice.
Oh, this is the great need of this hour.
As I look out over our nation, God has given many of you talent.
God has given many of you economic resources, and he’s given you educational resources.
And this is the challenge and an opportunity of the hour to use these things to furnish leadership for our nation in this hour.
Let none of us become so high on the intellectual, the economic ladder, or any of these particular ladders, that we become separated from the problems that the masses of people confront.
Let us discover that we will never get into the Promised Land until all of us get there together.