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Adolf Hitler
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American activist and Baptist minister who brought his faith in the value of nonviolent resistance to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1955, King—a pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery—was chosen to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. He and his fellow Alabamians engaged in acts of civil disobedience that eventually led to the desegregation of the city’s bus system. Following the success of the boycotts, King became a renowned and respected civil rights leader. He led more nonviolent demonstrations, such as the march from Selma to Montgomery—but as progress stalled, radical factions of the civil rights and Black Power movements doubted his nonviolent strategy. King himself admitted to mounting frustrations with going to jail repeatedly and “living every day under the threat of death.” In 1968, on a trip to Memphis, Tennessee, King was assassinated on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel. Throughout Caste, Isabel Wilkerson draws attention to how King’s time in India studying caste opened his eyes to how the American caste system functioned—and how difficult it would be to dismantle it.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes in Caste
The Caste quotes below are all either spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or refer to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Brown Eyes versus Blue Eyes
Quotes
An otherwise neutral trait had been converted into a disability. The teacher later switched roles, and the blue-eyed children became the scapegoat caste, with the same caste behavior that had arisen the day before between these artificially constructed upper and lower castes. […]
Classroom performance fell for both groups of students during the few hours that they were relegated to the subordinate caste. The brown-eyed students took twice as long to finish a phonics exercise the day that they were made to feel inferior.
"I watched my students become what I told them they were," [Mrs. Elliott] told NBC News decades later.
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Explanation and Analysis:
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes in Caste
The Caste quotes below are all either spoken by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or refer to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Brown Eyes versus Blue Eyes
Quotes
An otherwise neutral trait had been converted into a disability. The teacher later switched roles, and the blue-eyed children became the scapegoat caste, with the same caste behavior that had arisen the day before between these artificially constructed upper and lower castes. […]
Classroom performance fell for both groups of students during the few hours that they were relegated to the subordinate caste. The brown-eyed students took twice as long to finish a phonics exercise the day that they were made to feel inferior.
"I watched my students become what I told them they were," [Mrs. Elliott] told NBC News decades later.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
