The injustice within
We read a bit of King’s “Our Struggle” this week. King speaks of “injustice” and “self-respect”. He writes that “many black men lost self-respect.” He ends the essay by saying that the conflict really isn’t about the buses.
Yet we believe that, if the method we use in dealing with equality in the buses can eliminate the injustice within ourselves, we shall at the same time be attacking the basis of injustice–man’s hostility to man. (Emphasis mine)
While I have thought about the ills of not having self-respect, I never thought of it in terms of doing an “injustice” to one’s self. We have images in our minds of those who fought for civil rights. But we also should have an image of ourselves fighting for our own self-respect.