It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
Power concedes nothing without demand.
It never did, and it never will. Were it not for such movements, such struggles, there would've been no political power, no progress. Those political gains were won at a prodigious, and horrific cost, in pain, loss, government terrorism, impoverishment, imprisonment and death, suffered by countless known and unknown Blacks, in the North and the South. New generations of politicians, eager to distance themselves from their meager and militant origins, played a political game as if their new-found power was a birthright, sneering at the poor, while lauding and embracing the wealthy and established, thus denigrating their very power base. Anxious to assume the class prerogatives granted by entre into new realms of power, most politicians forgot from whence they came.