Using America's Ideals as the Basis for Equality

Neither Martin Luther King, Jr. nor Frederick Douglass were extremists; both argued that African-Americans have a natural right to equality. King and Douglass claimed that black people had been robbed of their equality by white Americans who refused to acknowledge their own hypocrisy by not affording people of color the liberties that were guaranteed them in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. In using America's stated ideals as the basis for their appeals for equality, King and Douglass sought to influence reasonable Americans, not hard core racists.

Both King and Douglass were recruited into their leadership roles as spokesmen for racial equality. King rose to prominence as a result of his involvement with the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott during the 1950s: "Although King had been in Montgomery for only a year and was just 26 years old, he was educated, the best speaker, and a minister, all assets which would pull the black community together" (Anderson 45). Douglass was persuaded by white abolitionists to become a lecturing agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society. The abolitionists were correct in their assumption that this runaway slave would be an effective tool in the anti-slavery cause. As one of Douglass's contemporaries writes, "As a public speaker, he excels in pathos, wit, comparison, imitation, strength of reasoning, and fluency of language" (Douglass 5).

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eligious persecution; they were seeking the same type of individual freedom for which blacks were now struggling. King then insists that America will never be a great nation until the words of this anthem are true for all Americans. In a similar fashion to King's "I Have a Dream," Douglass complained about the failure of white Americans to live up to American ideals of liberty. In a speech entitled "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" Douglass posed the following rhetorical question to white America, "Would you argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it" (Douglass 433). Douglass contends that to the slave, the Fourth of July is merely a reminder of centuries of gross injustices perpetrated by a nation that prides itself on its democratic ideals. The ideology espoused by King was not egalitarian because egalitarianism has never been a basic tenet of American political thought. What King abhorred was the lack of equal opportunity that resulted in black America's lack of access to basic economic security: "King urged that 'A new era, in which the full resources of the society would be used to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exis

Category: History - U