Chris Matthews Says You Can’t Be More American than African-Americans; MLK Speech Was ‘Shakespearean, Biblical’

“Well really, historically, you can’t be more American than African-Americans. Just look at the average African-American. The family has been here for three or 400 hundred years. White people you come across have been here since the 2nd or 3rd generation. That’s just a fact. You can’t be more American than the people who tilled the soil of this country more than centuries, you just can’t be. And here is Martin Luther King saying ‘we’re not some ethnic group, we’re America.’ And he went over this wonderful reference point over and over again to the different topography of this country. He claimed the land on which this republic lived as his land. And that language about the imagery you’re taught in grade school, how to use imagery. Using the curvaceous mountains of California. And talking about the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. And saying that this landmass on which we live, is America, and saying that civil rights belong on this landmass. It was a claim to America. It was not just Shakespearean and Biblical, it was also Woody Guthrie. It was a statement of Americanism for the 20th century. I thought it was spectacular. And I’ll tell you one thing: Nobody’s perfect, and Martin Luther King was not perfect. But that speech went beyond human ability to something truly inspired. It was something else. We’re not going to hear another one of those speeches again for a while.”