To Percival Leroy Prattis
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: April 26, 1961
Location: Atlanta, Ga.
Genre: Letter
Topic: Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views
Details
King thanks Prattis, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, for his recent letter regarding an article King wrote for The Nation, and reiterates his support for the creation of a Secretary of Integration, an idea that came to him after a 1959 trip to India.1 Prattis had expressed skepticism regarding the establishment of such a position.2
Mr. P. L. Prattis, Editor
PITTSBURGH COURIER
2628 Centre Avenue
Pittsburgh 19, Pennsylvania
Dear Mr. Prattis:
I am deeply grateful to you for your very kind and full letter of February 17. Please accept my apologies for being so tardy in my reply. A brief trip out of the country, other absences from the city and the accumulation of a great deal of mail account for the delay.
I am deeply grateful to you for your comments concerning my article in NATION magazine. I can well understand your fear that a Secretary of Integration may bring into being a new bureaucracy which would have as much interest in keeping segregation alive as in promoting integration. Certainly this is one of the risks that would be taken in setting up such a secretaryship. However, I am convinced that we have never fully mobilized the forces of our nation behind the integration process. We have, in the past, moved only in a piecemeal fashion, and politicians always have rationalizations to give for not moving faster. I see the position as Secretary of Integration as one way that the federal government can express its determination to bring an end to the long desolate night of segregation. This agency would coordinate all of the government’s activity in this field and make sure that all of the other governmental departments will enforce non-discriminatory operations. Frankly, this idea came to me as a result of my visit to India a few years ago. In seeking to end caste untouchability, the national government of India set up a department with a special minister to deal with the problem of ending untouchability.3 I was so impressed with the amazing advances that have been made in India in ending discrimination against untouchables that I felt that a similar move on the part of the federal government of the United States would be the most meaningful.4
At any rate, I have no pretense to omniscience and I am sure that I could be altogether wrong in my contention at this point. My only concern is that we use all of our resources to solve a problem that has existed far too long and one that will determine the destiny of our nation. I do not conceive that any of the ideas that I have projected are the ultimate solutions to the race problem. Like Gandhi, I think we are all engaged in an experiment with truth.5 I think that by our constant working together and unswerving devotion to the idea of freedom and human dignity, we will come up with the right answer.
It is always good to hear from you. Please feel free to write at any time. May the days ahead bring us nearer to the “beloved” community and a society where the brotherhood of man is a reality.
Very sincerely yours,
[signed] Martin L. King Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
K.m
1. Prattis to King, 17 February 1961; King, “Equality Now,” 4 February 1961, pp. 139–150 in this volume.
2. Although Prattis mostly praised King’s article, he was unenthusiastic about King’s idea of a Secretary of Integration. Prattis maintained that the president should make his position for integration “unmistakingly clear,” and make it known to his administration “that he wants action” and “that he is not playing.” Prattis was optimistic about the president’s response to racial matters, since he had received personal confirmation from Kennedy, who told him: “P. L., I would get up off my fanny and do something” (Prattis to King, 17 February 1961).
3. Article 338 of the Indian Constitution established a Commissioner of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, placed under the Ministry of Home Affairs, to investigate matters concerning the protection and welfare of lower castes. Lakshmidas Mangaldas Shrikant served as the first Commissioner from 1950–1961.
4. Several months after his trip to India, King published an account of his tour in Ebony magazine that included a section on India’s form of atonement for past injustices to untouchables (King, “My Trip to the Land of Gandhi,” July 1959, in Papers 5:236).
5. King refers to Mahatma Gandhi’s 1927 book An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Ahmadabad: Navajivan Publishing House).
Source: PLPC-DHU-MS, Percival Leroy Prattis Collection, Howard University, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Washington, D.C.