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Tue 9 Feb, 2010 08:42 am
I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.
What does the sentence mean, especially the part in bold?
Many thanks.
Interposition means to put someone or something between two other someones or somethings. In this case--in a remark obviously from the era of the civil rights movement in the 1960s--the author (Martin Luther King, Jr. ?) is referring to the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, "interposing" the authority of the state between the civil rights protesters and the Federal Government.
Nullification is a little more complex, and goes quite a way back in American history. The theory of nullification was that individual states had the right to nullify any Federal law within their own borders. It was a bankrupt political theory, ignoring as it did the authority granted to the Congress by the constitution to legislate in many matters which affected all of the states. So, in the 1960s, Governor Wallace of Alabama claimed that the state had the right to "nullify" (to void, to make inoperative) the effects of the Surpreme Court decisions on school desegregation.
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