Welcome to the 84th week of The Latino Newsletter, and while our newsroom is closed today in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I still wanted to continue a tradition that started when Latino Rebels launched back in 2011.
Back then, every MLK Day we tried to do something simple: connect King’s words to the present day as a practice in solidarity and clarity.
We weren’t interested in the sanitized version of his legacy. We wanted to feature the King who named systems, challenged complacency, and insisted that justice was never something you wait for.
Some of that early work is harder to find now. The good news is the Latino Rebels Scribd account is still active, and I remembered that I uploaded a document there years ago: King’s 1962 speeches and remarks in Puerto Rico, some of them delivered on the campus of Inter-American University. He also spoke at the main University of Puerto Rico campus. That document has received over 75,000 views since I uploaded it.
The file is 17 pages long, and I try to read it every year.
“I mentioned that figuratively speaking that Old Man Segregation is on his death bed. But history has proven that social systems have a great last-minute breathing power,” King said at one point. “And the guardians of the status quo are always on hand with their oxygen tents to keep the old order alive. And so segregation is still with us. We still confront it in the South in its glaring and conspicuous form. We still confront it in the North, where Negroes and Puerto Ricans and other minority groups are concerned, and it’s hidden in several forms. There are those who have come to see now that if democracy is to live, segregation must die. For segregation is a cancer in the body politic, which must be removed before our democratic and Christian health can be realized. We don’t have long to solve this problem. And this is what I have tried to say, and this is what many others are saying all over the nation. We don’t have long to solve it.”
This was not the only time King visited Puerto Rico. He made a brief stop in 1960, and he also spoke in 1965 at Estadio Hiram Bithorn.
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Julio Ricardo Varela is the founder of The Latino Newsletter. He is also its current part-time publisher and executive director. He edited and published this edition of The Latino Newsletter.