“I strongly disagree with any position that advocates slowing up on (civil rights) legislation at this time.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. / Carlo Roppa / Kelly Ingram Park / Birmingham, Alabama
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Honolulu on the morning of September 14, 1959 and wasted no time in setting the agenda for his visit. Shortly after landing, King gave an interview with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, where he called out Hawaii Senator Hiram Fong for what King considered to be a dawdling stance on civil rights legislation. Fong, it was reported, felt that the US Congress shouldn’t rush into legislation to address civil rights issues. Time, he said, could cure most emotional issues. The comment, clownish in its understanding of injustice as an “emotional issue,” perhaps, made Fong King’s first course of business after touching down in the newly minted, fiftieth state of the Union.
“I would not want to openly criticize him as a person,” King said of Fong. “I don’t know whether he really didn’t understand the situation . . . Time does not heal problems of a social order.”
King’s schedule while in Honolulu included speaking engagements with the Honolulu Ministerial Union, Armed Services YMCA, Punahou School, and various public events. The main event of his trip, however, would be a speech to the House of Representatives during its premiere legislative session, a christening, perhaps, upon the new state that had shown itself to be a beacon to other societies. Hawaii was a “noble example” of progress “in the area of racial harmony and racial justice.” Hawaii was a society to be celebrated and emulated, even with politicians like Fong, who wasn’t opposed to the idea of civil rights legislation, but didn’t agree with King’s urgency to get it done.
“We are to free all men, all races and all groups,” King said to the House. “This is our responsibility and this is our challenge and we look to this great new state in our Union as the example and as the inspiration.”
In closing, King told a story about a Southern preacher whose lack of proper grammar or eloquent speech didn’t get in the way of his ability to deliver a powerful sermon, a slight pander, perhaps, to an audience that had grown up speaking pidgin English on racially segregated sugar plantations:
“We have come a long, long way. We have a long, long way to go. I close, if you will permit me, by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher. He didn’t quite have his grammar right, but he uttered some words in the form of a prayer with great symbolic profundity and these are the words he said: ‘Lord, we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be, but thank God, we ain’t what we was.’ Thank you.”