Arthur Howe's Open Salon Blog

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:01:04 -0500

As I write this year’s annual remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr., a “quote” of Dr. King’s has been in the national news. In a 1968 sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Dr. King said: “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.” Instead, the poorly paraphrased “quote” carved into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial reads, “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”

Maya Angelou has said that the “quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit. . . . The ‘if’ clause that is left out is salient. Leaving it out changes the meaning completely. . . . [It] minimizes the man.” As a result, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has given the National Park Service 30 days to fix the quote.

Words do matter. For this year’s remembrance, I would like to focus on another phrase from Dr. King, one that appropriately and accurately may be found on the memorial’s Inscription Wall:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Dr. King may be best known for using these words in his April 16, 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

While confined in the city jail for his non-violent protests, Dr. King wrote to fellow clergymen who called his activities “unwise and untimely.” Addressing the argument that he was an outside agitator, Dr. King wrote:

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

Thus, in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, Dr. King used these words – “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” – for a purpose. That purpose was to answer a charge commonly raised during the Civil Rights movement – that the people living in the community were content with the social order, that any social strife was due to outside rabble rousers.

But the Letter from the Birmingham Jail was not the first time that Dr. King had used these words. In Stride Toward Freedom: the Montgomery Story, his 1958 book about the Montgomery bus boycott, Dr. King wrote:

The racial issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem. The citizenship rights of Negroes cannot be flouted anywhere without impairing the rights of every other American. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. A breakdown of law in Alabama weakens the very foundations of lawful government in the other forty-seven states. The mere fact that we live in the United States means that we are caught in a network of inescapable mutuality. Therefore, no American can afford to be apathetic about the problem of racial justice. It is a problem that meets every man at his front door. The racial problem will be solved in America to the degree that every American considers himself personally confronted with it. Whether one lives in the heart of the Deep South or on the periphery of the North, the problem of injustice is his problem; it is his problem because it is America’s problem.

Once again, Dr. King used the same words for a purpose – but a somewhat different purpose. At the time of the Montgomery bus boycott, Dr. King was the pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Since he lived in Montgomery, Dr. King did not then face the charge of being an outside agitator. Rather, Dr. King used his phrase for the express purpose of persuading “white Northern liberals” to support what was becoming the Civil Rights movement.

Nor was the Letter from the Birmingham Jail the last time that Dr. King used these words. On July 28, 1967, Dr. King, who that spring had spoken out against the Vietnam War, was interviewed on the television show Face to Face. An audience member asked him why he is spending more time speaking out against the war in Vietnam than raising funds for job training and scholarships for Negroes. Dr. King answered:

I have worked too long now and too hard to get rid of segregation in public accommodations to turn back to the point of segregating my moral concerns. Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And wherever I see injustice, I’m going to take a stand against it whether it’s in Mississippi or in Vietnam.

Dr. King repeated the same words on Veteran’s Day, 1967, when he spoke in Chicago to the National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace on the subject of the domestic impact of the war in Vietnam. He made the same point when he spoke on “The Other America” to Local 1199 of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees on March 10, 1968 – less than a month before his assassination.

Once again, Dr. King used the same words for a purpose, this time not to defend himself against the accusation that he was an outside agitator nor to seek support in the North for the civil rights struggle in the South but rather to explain why he, a civil rights leader, spoke out against the Vietnam War.

As with many of Dr. King’s most powerful phrases, these words – that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere – can trace their origins back to earlier sources.

In his 1943 book Justice for My People, Ernst Frankenstein wrote:

You can render justice and refuse it. But you cannot render it to some and deny it to others without being fundamentally unjust. This is the decisive test for the future of mankind. You must choose. Justice is indivisible.

In 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoting the Declaration of the International Labor Organization, said, “Poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere.”

A 1944 article in The Catholic World stated:

We have heard that peace is indivisible. Say rather that justice is indivisible. Injustice in one respect breeds injustice in other respects. What is done or tolerated in one place will be done or attempted in others.

A 1945 article in the Anglican journal The Churchman stated:

It took us a long time to realize how superbly right Maxim Litvinoff [Soviet foreign minister in the 1930s] was when at Geneva he coined his much-quoted phrase, “Peace is indivisible.” What price shall we now pay before we realize that justice, too, is indivisible, that injustice anywhere must ultimately invalidate justice everywhere?

Could a young Martin Luther King, Jr. have read any of these sources? It is certainly possible, although I know of no record of it. In 1944, when he was only 15 years old, Martin Luther King, Jr. skipped twelfth grade and became a freshman at Morehouse College. By his own account, he began college reading at an eight-grade level.

Perhaps different people each invented similar words for their own rhetorical purposes. Perhaps Martin Luther King, Jr. came across one of these sources during his later studies at Crozer Theological Seminary or Boston University. In a real sense, it does not matter.

Dr. King distilled the phrase to its essence. He employed it powerfully. He made the words his own and bequeathed them to us as his legacy.

A Mighty Stream

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 21:01:07 -0500

This year marks the 25th celebration of our nation’s holiday commemorating the life of Dr. Martin Luther King.

As in past years, I would like to remember the man by considering one of the phrases for which he is best known. In his I Have A Dream speech at the 1963 March on Washington, Dr. King declared, “we will not be satisfied until ‘justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”

Amos

Dr. King was quoting perhaps his favorite prophet, Amos.

Among the Old Testament prophets, Amos has been called a minor prophet. Amos even said of himself, “I am not a prophet.” (Amos 7:14.) Prophet or not, Amos was an in-your-face type of guy.

Amos preached to those reclining at ease on beds of ivory in their winter and summer houses of well-hewn stone, who enjoyed pleasant gardens and vineyards, fig trees and olive trees, who drank wine while anointing themselves with the finest of oils and listening to the music of a harp. (3:15, 4:9, 5:11, 6:1, 6:4-6.) (Even today, a double magnum bottle of wine is called a Jeroboam, named after the King of Israel in Amos’ day.)

Amos declared that they had pushed the afflicted out of their way, oppressed the poor and crushed the needy, hoarded up violence and devastation in their citadels, cheated with dishonest scales, took bribes, and bought helpless slaves for money -- in sum, that they had turned justice into wormwood and poison. (2:7, 3:10, 4:1, 5:7, 5:11-12, 6:12, 8:5-6.)

Amos prophesized that “thus says the Lord God . . . :”

I hate, I reject your festivals, nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies.

Even though you offer up to Me burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not accept them; and I will not even look at the peace offerings of your fatlings.

Take away from Me the noise of your songs; I will not even listen to the sound of your harp.

But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

(Amos 5:21-24.)

Dr. King

Amos inspired Dr. King’s entire ministry.

In 1952 or 1953, while studying for his doctorate in divinity, Martin Luther King wrote these notes:

5:21:24 -- This passage might be called the key passage of the entire book. It reveals the deep ethical nature of God. God is a God that demands justice rather than sacrifice; righteousness rather than ritual. The most elaborate worship is but an insult to God when offered by those who have no mind to conform to his ethical demands. Certainly this is one of the most noble idea[s] ever uttered by the human mind.

One may raise the question as to whether Amos was against all ritual and sacrifice, i.e. worship. I think not. It seems to me that Amos' concern is the ever-present tendency to make ritual and sacrifice a substitute for ethical living. Unless a man's heart is right, Amos seems to be saying, the external forms of worship mean nothing. God is a God that demands justice and sacrifice can never be a substitute for it. Who can disagree with such a notion?

Amos' emphasis throughout seems to be that justice between man and man is one of the divine foundations of society. Such an ethical ideal is at the root of all true religion. This high ethical notion conceived by Amos must alway[s] remain a challenge to the Christian church.

On May 2, 1954, as a 25-year-old minister giving his first sermon as pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, he preached, “I have felt with Amos that when God speaks who can but prophesy.” (Amos 3:8.)

On December 5, 1955 -- the first day of the Montgomery bus boycott -- Dr. King was just 26 years old when he was elected President of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which had called the boycott. He was beginning the second year of his ministry and needed 15 hours to prepare his Sunday sermons, but that evening had only 20 minutes to prepare the most decisive speech of his life to the thousands who packed the mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church:

We are here this evening for serious business. We are here in a general sense because first and foremost we are American citizens, and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its means. We are here because of our love for democracy, because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth. But we are here in a specific sense, because of the bus situation in Montgomery. We are here because we are determined to get the situation corrected.

. . .

My friends, I want it to be known that we're going to work with grim and firm determination to gain justice on the buses in this city. And we are not wrong, we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this Nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a Utopian dreamer and never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

On January 30, 1956, during the bus boycott, white supremacists firebombed Dr. King’s house while Dr. King was away speaking. His wife Coretta Scott King and their baby daughter Yolanda were at home but escaped without injury. When he returned, he spoke to an angry crowd that had gathered at his house. He told them to go home, saying “We must learn to meet hate with love.” Five days later, he received a telegram from Julian Grayson, an undergraduate classmate at Crozer Theological Society who had become a Methodist minister. It read simply, “FIGHT ON AMOS GOD IS WITH YOU.”

His first book, Stride Toward Freedom, published in 1958, shed light on his calling:

Any discussion of the Christian minister today must ultimately emphasize the need for prophecy. Not every minister can be a prophet, but some must be prepared for the ordeals of this high calling and be willing to suffer courageously for righteousness. May the problem of race in America soon make hearts burn so that prophets will rise up, saying, “Thus saith the Lord,” and cry out as Amos did, “. . . let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

In his April 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail -- written less than five months before the March on Washington -- Dr. King compared the struggle for civil rights to “the prophets of the eighth century B.C. [who] left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their home towns . . . .”

Like Amos, Dr. King, in his I Have A Dream speech, called it like it is. Just as Amos’ God did not accept the iniquities of 8th century BC Israel, Dr. King declared why segregation was unacceptable:

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?”

We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.

We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.

We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Inspired by Amos, Dr. King reminded America that the 1963 centennial celebration of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation should not be an empty ritual, that equal justice was the foundation of our society, that a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could not oppress an entire class of its citizens, and that our ethical ideals rooted in the American dream remained a challenge to our country.

Years later, speaking of a big downtown white church in a major American city that was looking for a pastor that would preach the gospel but not talk about social issues, Dr. King observed, “Whenever a church gets like that, it will stand in the midst of the injustices of life and yet refuse to say anything about them. Whenever a church gets like that, it will refuse to hear Amos cry out, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”

Even in his final words -- his I’ve Been to the Mountaintop address -- given the night before his assassination, Dr. King returned again to Amos:

Who is it that is supposed to articulate the longings and aspirations of the people more than the preacher? Somehow the preacher must have a kind of fire shut up in his bones. And whenever injustice is around he tells it. Somehow the preacher must be an Amos, and saith, “When God speaks who can but prophesy?” Again with Amos, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Imagery

The power of the phrase flows from more than merely its Biblical resonances and Dr. King’s delivery. Its imagery evokes water’s elemental power to merge together and to wash away, to cleanse and to purify, to quench thirst and to bring life itself.

These words take physical form at the Civil Rights Memorial, a few blocks away from Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. When its designer Maya Lin read Dr. King’s quote in I Have A Dream from the Book of Amos, “I knew that the whole piece had to be about water,” Lin said. The names of civil rights martyrs are inscribed on a circular, black granite table. Water emerges from the table’s center and flows over the top. Behind the table, water cascades over a curved black granite wall engraved with the words “…until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

“At the dedication ceremony, Emmett Till’s mother was touching his name beneath the water and crying,” Lin recalled, and “I realized that her tears were becoming part of the monument.” And, in a larger sense, a mother's tears merged with the tears and sweat and blood of others as part of a mighty stream.

The Fierce Urgency of Now

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:01:45 -0500

As we mark Martin Luther King Day, let us remember the man by considering one of his most powerful phrases: “the fierce urgency of now.”

When he declared victory in the Iowa caucuses, Barack Obama based his “Our Moment is Now” speech upon Dr. King's words. When he endorsed Obama, Edward Kennedy declared that he had “lit a spark of hope amid the fierce urgency of now.”

On August 28, 1963, Dr. King delivered these words from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in his most famous speech, “I Have A Dream.” After looking back at the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Declaration of Independence and before sharing his dream for the future, Dr. King spoke of the present moment, saying:

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now.

He used repetition to drive home the urgency of the moment:

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

As Coretta Scott King later recalled, “When he got to the rhythmic part of demanding freedom now, . . . the crowd caught the timing and shouted ‘now’ in a cadence.”

Even today, when you listen to a recording of his address, you still can hear the echo of the audience responding to Dr. King’s repeated refrain that “now is the time.”

On April 4, 1967, in his address “Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence,” Dr. King spoke further about the “fierce urgency of now.”

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.”

Dr. King’s emphasis on the urgency of the present was not unique. Shortly before Dr. King spoke at the march on Washington, John Lewis, then Chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, said:

To those who have said, “Be patient and wait,” we must say that “patience” is a dirty and nasty word. We cannot be patient, we do not want to be free gradually. We want our freedom, and we want it now.

What was different was the enduring power of Dr. King’s phrase. Although the words were his own, Dr. King may have built the phase “the fierce urgency of now” upon the language of a fellow minister with whom he was familiar.

Reuben Emmanuel Nelson (1905-1960) was the General Secretary of the American Baptist Convention of 1950 through 1959. As General Secretary, he had issued an open letter inviting Baptists, regardless of race, to join in fellowship with the American Baptist Convention -- an offer that Dr. King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church accepted in 1962, when it voted to affiliate with the Convention.

We know that Dr. King knew Reuben Nelson. Under Nelson’s leadership, the American Baptist Convention contributed $900 towards the trip that Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King took to India in February and March, 1959, where Dr. King studied Gandhi’s teachings and methods. On March 23, 1959, Dr. King wrote Reuben Nelson a letter (collected in The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.), thanking him and the Convention for their generosity.

Nelson himself wrote a “Prayer for Guidance” (published in 1961 in Reuben E. Nelson: Free Churchman by Robert George Torbet and Henry R. Bowler). In it, Nelson asks to “Give me the confidence to know My will in Thine,” declaring that “He knows the urgency of ‘now.’”

Did Dr. King know Nelson’s Prayer for Guidance? Was it a source upon which Dr. King drew when he spoke of the urgency of now? We do not know; the answer may be lost to the mists of time. But we do know and still can feel the punch that the phrase packs.

Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968 -- Memphis

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:01:15 -0500

Starting in 2002, I circulated an email within my law firm to mark Martin Luther King Day. Each year through 2008, I looked back at Dr. King's life 40 years before, from 1962 until his assassination in 1968. Here is my 2008 email.

Today is Dr. Martin Luther King day. As in past years, I suggest that we honor the man by recalling his words and deeds from four decades ago.

In late 1967, Dr. King launched the Poor People's Campaign, which he saw as the next step after desegregation and the right to vote in the struggle for genuine equality. He described the campaign as "the beginning of a new co-operation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity."

As part of the campaign, Dr. King traveled to Memphis in March 1968 to support a strike for better wages and working conditions by the sanitation workers union. The striking workers carried signs saying simply "I AM A MAN." After a march on March 28, 1968, turned violent, the city called in 3,800 National Guard soldiers. Troops armed with rifles and mounted bayonets, armored personnel carriers with 50-caliber machine guns, and tanks patrolled the city streets.

On April 3, 1968, an U.S. Marshal served Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with a temporary restraining order from a federal judge, barring him from leading another march in Memphis without court approval. That evening, at the Mason Temple, Dr. King gave his last speech to an audience of 2,000. At the conclusion of his speech, he said:

And then I got into Memphis. And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop.

And I don't mind.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

At 6:01 p.m. on April 4, 1968, as he stood on the balcony outside of room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Dr. King was assassinated. He was 39 years old.

Two months earlier to the day, Dr. King, on February 4, 1968, in a sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, said the following:

If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. (Yes) And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize—that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards—that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school. (Yes)

I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. (Yes)

I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody.

I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. (Amen)

I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. (Yes)

And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. (Yes)

I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. (Lord)

I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity. (Yes)

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. (Amen) Say that I was a drum major for peace. (Yes) I was a drum major for righteousness.

And all of the other shallow things will not matter. (Yes) I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind.

But I just want to leave a committed life behind. (Amen) And that's all I want to say.

Dr. Martin Luther King in 1967 -- Vietnam

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:01:26 -0500

Today is Dr. Martin Luther King day. As in past years, I suggest that we honor the man by recalling his words and deeds from four decades ago.

As we fight today in Iraq, forty years ago we were fighting in Vietnam. 1967 was the year in which Dr. King came out publicly against the war. His words were controversial, not only among the nation, but within the civil rights movement. In response to Dr. King, the NAACP issued a statement against merging the civil rights and peace movements.

I know of no better way to remember Dr. King's life in 1967 than to offer you below his words given at the Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967 -- one year to the day before his assassination in Memphis. His full address and an audio recording are available at http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm.

Dr. King speaking at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967

"Beyond Vietnam"

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.

. . . .

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.

. . . .

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 fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

. . . .

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. . . .

. . . .

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.

. . . .

. . . 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.

. . . .

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit . . . .

And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God. . . .

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.

. . . .

. . . The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. . . .

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."

. . . .

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.