Politics & Power Quote by Ralph Abernathy

Dare us, Ralph Abernathy implies, and watch how the dare boomerangs back onto the state. The line is built like a chant because it was meant to live in the street, not on the page: a rolling inventory of coercion (tear gas, grenades, Mace, troopers, National Guard) that makes the government sound less like a keeper of order and more like an occupying force. By stacking the tools of repression in plain, almost workmanlike nouns, Abernathy denies them mystique. He names them the way you’d name farm equipment. That’s the first power move: demythologize the machinery of fear.

The intent is immediate and tactical - to harden resolve in the face of imminent violence - but the subtext is prosecutorial. “Let the record show” is courtroom language, a phrase that turns the protest into testimony. Even if the authorities control the streets in the moment, Abernathy is laying claim to the longer timeline where legitimacy gets decided. The state can disperse bodies; it can’t as easily disperse evidence.

Context matters because Abernathy is speaking from within a movement that made nonviolence a communications strategy as much as an ethic. If police escalate, the contrast sharpens: disciplined marchers versus militarized response. “We ain’t going to be turned around” lands with the grammar of the pulpit and the cadence of a freedom song, insisting that Black citizenship is not a request waiting for approval. It’s a forward motion the state will eventually have to answer for.