Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Speech on Vietnam War
First we provide an inferior education for black students. Next we give them a series of tests which many will flunk because of an inferior education. Then we pack these academic failures off to Vietnam to be killed.
What is the thing that we loosely call freedom? This word is sanctioned with lies in the time of this war. Why restrain what we have taken the time to build so heavenly. An education is given to explore the mind but is wasted on this senseless war. Who are you? Who are we? Who I am to stop the birth of a mind that can grow beyond measure, which can one day lead us to liberty?
The tests were designed to select out the culturally gifted for continued college education and consign the intellectually deprived to the armed services. Implicit in the draft deferment tests is the theory of a race of Aryan supermen and the belief that rare great minds alone are fit to direct the destinies of a nation and to dispose of the lives of its untutored masses. Instead of a social democracy where equality is encouraged to flourish these draft deferment tests lay the foundation for a racial aristocracy. These tests are reminiscent of Hitler's twin system of eugenics and education -- weed out the intellectually deprived or socially undesirables by conscripting them for cannon fodder."
Bibliography:
http://www.aavw.org/protest/politics_powell_abstract05.html
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