Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break
Silence
a speech by Martin Luther King,
Jr.
delivered 4 April 1967 at a meeting
of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York
City
*Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I
need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight,
and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern
about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out
in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a
great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager,
and Rabbi Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities
of our nation. And of course it's always good to come back to
Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege
of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is
always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church
and this great pulpit.*
I come to this magnificent house of worship
tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join
you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the
aims and work of the organization which has brought us together:
Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements
of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart,
and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines:
"A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time
has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt,
but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one.
Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily
assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially
in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty
against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own
bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues
at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this
dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized
by uncertainty; but we must move on.
And some of us who have already begun
to break the silence of the night have found that the calling
to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must
speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited
vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely
this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant
number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the
prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm
dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading
of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is,
let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may
be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new
way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved
to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the
burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures
from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned
me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns
this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you
speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining
the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't
mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your
people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand
the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened,
for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known
me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest
that they do not know the world in which they live.
In the light of such tragic misunderstanding,
I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I
trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began
my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make
a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed
to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed
to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity
of the total situation and the need for a collective solution
to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North
Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor
to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution
of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to
be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and
history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are
never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak
with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my
fellowed [sic] Americans, *who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility
in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.
Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose
it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing
Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.* There is at the outset
a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in
Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America.
A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It
seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor --
both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were
experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam,
and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were
some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and
I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or
energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like
Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic
destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to
see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Perhaps the more tragic recognition of
reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was
doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home.
It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands
to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative
to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young
men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight
thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which
they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so
we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching
Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together
for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the
same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning
the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly
live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the
face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My third reason moves to an even deeper
level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes
of the North over the last three years -- especially the last
three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected,
and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and
rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them
my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social
change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But
they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if
our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve
its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions
hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against
the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first
spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world
today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the
sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands
trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
For those who ask the question, "Aren't
you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me
from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957
when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America."
We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain
rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that
America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants
of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still
wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black
bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:
O, yes,_I say it plain,_America never
was America to me,_And yet I swear this oath --_America will be!
Now, it should be incandescently clear
that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of
America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes
totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can
never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men
the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined
that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent,
working for the health of our land.
As if the weight of such a commitment
to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden
of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954** [sic]; and I cannot
forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission --
a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for
"the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes
me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present
I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to
the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry
to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at
those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be
that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men
-- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours,
for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have
they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who
loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can
I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister
of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share
with them my life?
And finally, as I try to explain for you
and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place
I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said
that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men
the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling
of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood,
and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially
for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight
to speak for them.
This I believe to be the privilege and
the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances
and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and
which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions.
We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the
victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy,"
for no document from human hands can make these humans any less
our brothers.
And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam
and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in
compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula.
I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies
of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply
of the people who have been living under the curse of war for
almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because
it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there
until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken
cries.__They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese
people proclaimed their own independence *in 1954* -- in 1945
*rather* -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and
before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho
Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of
Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize
them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest
of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese
people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim
to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international
atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected
a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government
that had been established not by China -- for whom the Vietnamese
have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that included
some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real
land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.
For nine years following 1945 we denied
the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years
we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to
recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting
eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French
were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their
reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge
financial and military supplies to continue the war even after
they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full
costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.
After the French were defeated, it looked
as if independence and land reform would come again through the
Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined
that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the
peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious
modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched
and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported
their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification
with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided
over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers
of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency
that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they
may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed
to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for
land and peace.
The only change came from America, as
we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which
were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All
the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular
promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish
under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese,
the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them
off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal
social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be
destroyed by our bombs.
So they go, primarily women and children
and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill
a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers
roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees.
They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties
from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So
far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They
wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless,
without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals.
They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for
food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers,
soliciting for their mothers.__What do the peasants think as we
ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any
action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they
think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans
tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration
camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam
we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We have destroyed their two most cherished
institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their
land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the
nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the
unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the
peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children
and killed their men.
Now there is little left to build on,
save bitterness. *Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining
will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the
concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The
peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on
such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts?
We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise.
These, too, are our brothers.
Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary
task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies.*
What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous
group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must
they think of the United States of America when they realize that
we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped
to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What
do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their
own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when
now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there
were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us
when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign
of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new
weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their
feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must
see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence.
Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction
simply dwarf their greatest acts.
How do they judge us when our officials
know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist,
and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they
be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control
of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow
national elections in which this highly organized political parallel
government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of
free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled
by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what
kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the
only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our
political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement
from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly
relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again,
and then shore it up upon the power of new violence?
Here is the true meaning and value of
compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's
point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of
ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses
of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow
and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the
opposition.
So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where
our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways,
we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for
them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and
especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi
are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese
and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth
and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness
of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle
against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded
to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and
seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954
they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which
could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam,
and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why
they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.
Also, it must be clear that the leaders
of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support
of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of
the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us
that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even
supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the
tens of thousands.
Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused
to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures
for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they
had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has
spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely
heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for
an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and
mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy.
Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when
he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression
as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than
*eight hundred, or rather,* eight thousand miles away from its
shores.
At this point I should make it clear that
while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to
the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those
who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about
our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that
what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing
process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and
seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death,
for they must know after a short period there that none of the
things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before
long they must know that their government has sent them into a
struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize
that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while
we create a hell for the poor.
Somehow this madness must cease. We must
stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering
poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste,
whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.
I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price
of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.
I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands
aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America,
to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this
war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.
This is the message of the great Buddhist
leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and
I quote:
Each day the war goes on the hatred
increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of
those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even
their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that
the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities
of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are
incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of
America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom,
and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).
If we continue, there will be no doubt
in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable
intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people
of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative
than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we
have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America
that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that
we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam,
that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people.
The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply
from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors
in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to
this tragic war.
*I would like to suggest five concrete
things that our government should do immediately to begin the
long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this
nightmarish conflict:
Number one: End all bombing in North and
South Vietnam.__Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in
the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.__Three:
Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast
Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference
in Laos.__Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National
Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and
must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any
future Vietnam government.__Five: *Set a date that we will remove
all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva
Agreement.
Part of our ongoing...part of our ongoing
commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum
to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which
included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations
we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical
aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country,
if necessary. Meanwhile... meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues
have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage
itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise
our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse
ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words
by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.
*As we counsel young men concerning military
service, we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam
and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection.
I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than
seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and
I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam
a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all
ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions
and seek status as conscientious objectors.* These are the times
for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when
our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive
its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on
the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.
Now there is something seductively tempting
about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles
has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say
we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something
even more disturbing.__The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of
a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore
this sobering reality...and if we ignore this sobering reality,
we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned"
committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about
Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and
Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa.
We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending
rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound
change in American life and policy.
And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam,
but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.
In 1957, a sensitive American official
overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the
wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we
have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified
the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need
to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for
the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala.
It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas
in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have
already been active against rebels in Peru.
It is with such activity in mind that
the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five
years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible
will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by
choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken,
the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing
to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the
immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if
we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as
a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must
rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented
society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers,
profit motives and property rights, are considered more important
than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism,
and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
__A true revolution of values will soon
cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past
and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the
Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial
act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must
be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten
and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True
compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes
to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon
look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With
righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual
capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia,
Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no
concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This
is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed
gentry of South America and say, "This is not just."
The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach
others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand
on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling
differences is not just." This business of burning human
beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans
and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins
of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and
bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically
deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on
military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful
nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution
of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent
us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace
will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing
to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised
hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
*This kind of positive revolution of values
is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer.
Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or
nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through
their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish
its participation in the United Nations.* These are days which
demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. *We must not engage
in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for
democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism
is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with
positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity,
and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of
communism grows and develops.*
These are revolutionary times. All over
the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation
and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems
of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot
people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who
sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support
these revolutions.
It is a sad fact that because of comfort,
complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to
adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much
of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become
the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that
only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism
is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow
through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today
lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and
go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility
to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment
we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and
thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked
shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."
A genuine revolution of values means in
the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather
than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty
to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual
societies.
This call for a worldwide fellowship that
lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and
nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional
love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted
concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as
a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity
for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking
of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that
force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force
which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying
principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door
which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist
belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the
first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for
love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth
God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love."
"If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love
is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become
the order of the day.
We can no longer afford to worship the
god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans
of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate.
And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals
that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee
says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving
choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and
evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope
that love is going to have the last word" (unquote).
We are now faced with the fact, my friends,
that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency
of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there
is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the
thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and
dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men
does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately
for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every
plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues
of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too
late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully
records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The
moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."
We still have a choice today: nonviolent
coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision
to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam
and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders
on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down
the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those
who possess power without compassion, might without morality,
and strength without sight.
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate
ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for
a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers
wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great?
Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message
be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival
as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be
another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their
yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The
choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must
choose in this crucial moment of human history.
As that noble bard of yesterday, James
Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once to every man and nation comes
a moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth and Falsehood,
for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new Messiah
offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt
that darkness and that light.
Though the cause of evil prosper, yet
'tis truth alone is strong
Though her portions be the scaffold,
and upon the throne be wrong
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
and behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping
watch above his own.__And if we
will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform
this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.
If we will make the right choice, we will
be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a
beautiful symphony of brotherhood.
If we will but make the right choice,
we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all
over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness
like a mighty stream.
Martin Luther King, Jr. page
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