"I need you to make me do it" is the recognition that there are important things that I need you to make me do if they are to be done.

Recently, I listen to Harry Belafonte talk about a conversation that A. Philip Randolph had with President Franklin Delano and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt while visiting with them in the White House. For twenty-three minutes the President listened without interruption to what Randolph had to say. Then he said, "I agree with everything that you have said. You are the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. I NEED YOU TO MAKE ME DO IT." "I need you to make me do it."
There are so many things that are right and just that the President and other governmental leaders or legally and morally required to do but do not have the power to do, unless and until, we the people, make them do it. This is much different from voting for them.
It was not just the goodwill of officials of the Government that ended slavery, the justices of the U. S. Supreme Court coming to their senses that caused them to render the 1954 "Brown v. Board of Education" decision that reversed the 1896 "Plessy v. Ferguson" decision which held that seperate
but equal" was consitutional. Nor was it a moral awakening of Congresspersons that caused them to enact the 1964 Public Accomodation Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the 1968 Open Housing Act. What made it possible for leaders in these three branches of Government - legislative, judicial and executive - to take the actions cited above is: we the people made them do the right thing. No longer could they acquiesce to the mandate of the Ku Klux Klan and other white racists who were in full accord with Mississippi white supremacist J. K. Vardman who said, "I am just as opposed to Booker T. Washington as a voter, with all the Anglo-Saxon re-enforcements, as I am to the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical little coon, Andy Dotson, who blacks my shoes every morning." We the people made our leaders acquiesce to our desires for African-Americans. When Randolph, other black people and some right-minded white people, unfortunately, it took twenty years and four presidents after Roosevelt's death, made President Lyndon B. Johnson do the right thing, African-Americans got the vote and as a result today there are forty African-Americans in the House of Representatives and one African-American in the Senate. Frederick Douglass spoke to this point when he said, "Power never concedes nothing without demand; it never has and never will." Could it be that today, after the death of more than 2,300 American Soldiers in Iraq, more than 120,000 Iraqis and tens of hundreds of thousands Americans and Iraqis maimed for life that President Bush, surrounded by civilian and military warmongers, is saying, if the truth be told, a scarce commodity in this White House, "I NEED YOU TO MAKE ME BRING OUR SOLDIERS BACK HOME." That we can do. Will we do it now? Even having done it yesterday was too late. Of course, we didn't. If we had any doubts about what was the right thing to do yesterday; there is absolutely no doubt about what is the right thing to do now. We the people of America, as people the world over know, have the power to make the President cease the killing in Iraq. We must recognize that President Bush is saying, however, mutely, just as did President Roosevelt to Randolph, "I need you to make me do it."

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Uriah J. Fields
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Copyright 2006 by Uriah J. Fields