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
most 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’s always a rich and
rewarding experience to come to this great
church and this great pulpit.
I come to this great 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 that 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.”
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
perplexing 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.
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 movement, and pray
that our 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 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 fellow Americans.
Since I am a preacher by calling, 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 on 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 a 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.
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.
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 ghettos 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 asked, and rightly so, “What about
Vietnam?”
They asked 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.* And I cannot forget that
the Nobel Peace Prize 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 am 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?
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.
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,
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 and Diem
ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported
their extortionist landlords, and refused
even to discuss reunification with the North.
The peasants watched as all of 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 was 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 real 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 a 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 worlds, and especially
their distrust of American intentions now.
In Hanoi are the men who led this 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 unified
Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed
again.
When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate,
these things must be considered.
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 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.
Surely 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 destroy, whose
culture is being subverted.
I speak for the poor in America who are paying
the double price of smashed hopes at home,
and dealt 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 increased
in the hearts 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 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 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.
[sustained applause]
Part of our ongoing [applause continues],
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 [applause], 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.
[sustained applause] 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.
[applause] Moreover, I would encourage all
ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial
exemptions and seek status as conscientious
objectors.
[applause] 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 [applause],
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.
[sustained applause] 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 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.”
[applause] 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 to
the right side of the world revolution, we
as a nation must undergo a radical revolution
of values.
We must rapidly begin [applause], 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 than an edifice which produces
beggars needs restructuring.
[applause]
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.
[sustained applause]
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.
[applause] 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
[applause], 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; 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’m 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.
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
do 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.
