The Human Bullet 1968

[Glauco Schlembach]

Kingwas supporting striking sanitation workers when he went to Memphis in 1968 to lead a peaceful march. He was talking with friends on the balcony of Lorraine Motel on April 4 when he was struck by a rifle bullet and killed.

Community Music Center of Houston presents a musical remembrance performance. The concert will feature spirituals and a large work for orchestra. There will be performances by choir, soloists, and narrator. Free event.

A conversation with Reverend Dr. William A. Lawson Founding Pastor Emeritus of Wheeler Avenue Baptist Church, as he discusses the civil rights movement, his personal relationship and journey with Dr. King. Free event.

It would be easy enough to throw darts at "A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die." But it would be futile. This is such a bad, artless, stupid movie that it is unworthy of an attack. It deserves, perhaps, the kind of microscopic examination one might give a bug or a worm: It is boring as a movie but interesting as an example of what some people will pay their good money to see.

All of these Italian Westerns are aimed at the lowest possible common denominator. If you do not have enough intelligence to understand them, you belong in an institution. They dismiss plots as being too complicated. Instead, they're built around a string of situations (like a color cartoon). Each situation shows the hero threatened with violence. In some of the situations his torturers succeed. In others, he outsmarts them and turns the tables. It is all done with a minimum of words (to save dubbing into English) and a maximum of blood.

You are likely to see between 50 and 75 people killed in the average Italian Western. Unlike Tom and Jerry, they do not spring to life again. You are also likely to see human heads carried in burlap bags, priests shot on an altar, various parts of the body ripped apart and a lot of spit.

Because the formula is so established, the writers of these films hardly need imagination. As in cartoons and pornographic novels, the characters are not full-dimensional people but puppets with a function. In Italian Westerns, the function is to kill and maim. Any additional plotting is usually plagiarized, without credit, from better Westerns. In "A Minute to Pray, a Second to Die." for example, the main gimmick is that the hero has a bullet inside him which occasionally pinches a nerve and paralyzes him. This is lifted from Howard Hawks' "El Dorado," a very good film.

Matters like this are of little concern to the audience for these films, however. Another Italian Western, "A Stranger in Town," played at the United Artists a few weeks ago, and I was literally unable to sit through it in two attempts. In its Loop and neighborhood runs, "Stranger" racked up nearly a quarter of a million dollars. There, is a market for this sort of garbage. Why, I cannot say.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington, which helped bring about such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and is remembered each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a U.S. federal holiday since 1986.

A gifted student, King attended segregated public schools and at the age of 15 was admitted to Morehouse College, the alma mater of both his father and maternal grandfather, where he studied medicine and law.

King then enrolled in a graduate program at Boston University, completing his coursework in 1953 and earning a doctorate in systematic theology two years later. While in Boston he met Coretta Scott, a young singer from Alabama who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. The couple wed in 1953 and settled in Montgomery, Alabama, where King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

The King family had been living in Montgomery for less than a year when the highly segregated city became the epicenter of the burgeoning struggle for civil rights in America, galvanized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

In his role as SCLC president, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled across the country and around the world, giving lectures on nonviolent protest and civil rights as well as meeting with religious figures, activists and political leaders.

In 1960 King and his family moved to Atlanta, his native city, where he joined his father as co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. This new position did not stop King and his SCLC colleagues from becoming key players in many of the most significant civil rights battles of the 1960s.

Later that year, Martin Luther King Jr. worked with a number of civil rights and religious groups to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a peaceful political rally designed to shed light on the injustices Black Americans continued to face across the country.

Held on August 28 and attended by some 200,000 to 300,000 participants, the event is widely regarded as a watershed moment in the history of the American civil rights movement and a factor in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Captured on television, the brutal scene outraged many Americans and inspired supporters from across the country to gather in Alabama and take part in the Selma to Montgomery march led by King and supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson, who sent in federal troops to keep the peace.

The events in Selma deepened a growing rift between Martin Luther King Jr. and young radicals who repudiated his nonviolent methods and commitment to working within the established political framework.

James Earl Ray, an escaped convict and known racist, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted his confession and gained some unlikely advocates, including members of the King family, before his death in 1998.

On November 27, 1895, in the Swedish Club of Paris, Alfred Nobel signed his testament which later became so famous. This was almost exactly one year before his death on December 10, 1896, at San Remo in Italy.

Shortly after Cassin had completed his legal education, he was mobilized in the First World War. In 1916 a German bullet made him a war invalid and from then on he was mobilized in the demanding struggle for peace.

Let me mention the great efforts he made during the aftermath of the war in behalf of the disabled soldiers, the war widows, and the 800,000 orphaned French children. The organization which he formed and directed for their benefit had nearly one million members.1 And it was Cassin who was the driving force behind the social legislation which assured these war victims the social and economic protection they had a right to.

Public opinion was stunned by the reports of the atrocities in the concentration camps and of the extermination of those of Jewish origin. The general horror found expression in demands made on the governments of all nations to prevent a repetition of this assault on the value of human beings by adopting an international Bill of Rights.

To us who sit here, these rights sound like self-evident truths. A glance at conditions in the world around us will convince us, however, that in many states, yes, in most states, the promises of this simple Declaration are written in sand.

In the area of international law, however, the Declaration was a product of new thought. Whereas earlier treaties had regulated the relationships between nations and governments, this new Declaration made the individual himself the focus.

Man should be guaranteed these rights in whatever system of social organization he may live. Therefore, we can say that the Declaration of Human Rights is the constitution of a world society. It expresses our common ideals, and it embodies a goal which everyone can strive to attain. It is a standard by which we can measure the quality of the political system of any country.

The Declaration puts, therefore, a dividing line in history. It breaks away from the old, set doctrines of international law; yes, it allows us to look out over the boundaries of the old sovereign states toward a world society.

The Commission on Human Rights spent two years on the rough draft of the Declaration. In its extremely laborious work, in which each and every concept and the validity of each and every word were thoroughly aired in all languages, Professor Cassin held a key position. He formulated, defined, and clarified. He was crystal clear in his formulations and steadfast in his goal, but always cooperative and tolerant of the opinions of others. He upheld his ideas vigorously, but whenever he realized they had no immediate chance of being accepted, he was wise enough not to force the issue but to bide his time. The years that followed, which saw many new nations and new needs arise, proved to be ready for several of the proposals initially rejected in 1948 but now integrated in the text of the Convention.

Cassin also played a positive role as a mediator between the Western European way of thought, which emphasized civil and political rights, and the Eastern European viewpoint, which laid more weight on economic, social, and cultural rights.

The Declaration holds up an ideal for us, and it draws the guide lines for our actions. But a glance at reality today is enough to show us that we are far from the ideal. No country, not even the most advanced, can pride itself on fulfilling all the articles of the Declaration. Once the war and the ideals for which we fought have faded in the distance and new states have gained their independence, they are inclined to conduct their domestic affairs as they wish without regard to human rights.

In the work of making the Declaration of Human Rights legally binding among the states, Rne Cassin has actively participated in the preparation of the two Covenants, which, eighteen years after the Declaration, were unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 1966.

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