Discours Sur La ségrégation (en Anglais)

My fellow citizens,

I stand here in front of you, in this symbolic day which is, as you know, a federal holiday to pay a tribute to Martin Luther King, I stand here to tell you the long way Afro-Americans have travelled from slavery to freedom. First I would like to thank you for all your attention.

Did you ever wonder how the world of today has become tolerant?

The story begins there is a very long time. Indeed, many days have passed since slavery. Please remember that time when blacks were captured on the West Coast of Africa, torn from their roots, to satisfy the American owners. Mind you their life on the plantations, try to imagine the harsh conditions they endured. Constantly whipped, treated like cattle, they saw in the United States only a land of despair. However, it is a great American named Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the USA, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, which declares all slaves in the Confederacy free. It was a drop of golden sun in the shadow of their existence.

Nevertheless, this freedom was only a break, a short period. Indeed, very soon, in the 1890’s, white people denounced the black people’s rights and the Jim Crow Laws were created to restrict most of the new privileges granted to African Americans after the civil war. During this period, white and black people were separated in publics place like waiting rooms, toilets, buses, schools… Black people and ethnic minorities were persecuted.

Nowadays, we live free but imagine only you can’t take a bus simply because your skin is not white or imagine you can’t go in a restaurant simply because you are black, what would be your reaction?

Today, everyone is equal and this privilege, we owe to the brave defenders of freedom that Martin Luther King was the leader, we owe to all those Americans who never gave up the fight against segregation, we owe to all those who led the struggle until the victory in 1964.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of different color’s people. We are shaped by everyone and because we have tasted the bitter swill of segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass. Discrimination, racism are still present although they are fought. It seems to me that these are matters which concern us all, that this is our duty to fight prejudice and discrimination.

Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends, hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty, these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.

Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested we refused to let this journey end, that we did not turn back nor did we falter; and with eyes fixed on the horizon, we carried

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