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- [00:02]
Sam Cedar
The Majority rapport with Sam Cedar. The destiny of America is always safer in the hands of the people than in the conference rooms of any elite.
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Judge J. Wattes Waring
Sam Cedar.
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
They are unanimous in their hate for.
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Sam Cedar
Me and I welcome their hatred. We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. And I get the feeling you've been cheated.
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Narrator/Host
It is Monday, January 19, 2026. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five time award winning Majority Report. We are broadcasting live to tape steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, usa. On the program today, it is our special traditional, I mean in some very narrow circles, famous Martin Luther King Day compilation that we put out more or less every year. Sometimes it changes over the years it's changed a little bit. But we do this because, you know, people should take the time to both listen to things that Martin Luther King had to say. Our compilation also tries to give a sense of like sort of the context in which he operated, you know, to the extent that we can, and sort of some of the feeling of the emotion that was involved when he passed. And frankly, we also do this because particularly in an era like this, we need as many day off as we can get. I'm not gonna lie, it feels like it's January 19th. And I think if you were to do a brain scan and some type of bioassessment of everybody in the office, it would look like January 19th, but like 2043 or something. The point being is that, you know, we do this traditionally, but we particularly needed the, the day off Today we are living through an era that is not unprecedented in this country or a type of era that is not unprecedented in the country in many ways in the wake of Reconstruction in the late, in the teens and particularly like the early 1920s, something like, what was it, almost maybe 6% of the country, 100 million people. Six million people, card carrying, proud members of the KKK. And you know, we refer to people like Stephen Miller and the, the ICE people as, as Nazis and Gestapo, like, but they're also very much KKK like. And I mean, you know, Robert Paxton's the Anatomy of Fascism calls the Klan the sort of proto, exactly like the Nazis were also sort of based on parts, you know, they borrowed from the kkk. So you know, your era of fascism isn't always going to look like the past era, identical to the past era of fascism. It's a, there's some growth associated with it. And, but that's what we're living in. You've got the Trump administration reinstituted or rehired or I guess, de suspended. A guy who was caught, you know, to the Texas immigration office who was caught saying that migrants are all animals, they all need to be deported, et cetera, et cetera. This happened last week. We are in one of those eras. There are unique parts about it, and that is the massive amount of funding and the sort of, like, how it's been edified in the context of our government and not institutionalized in a way that is out and proud in a way that I don't think we've seen. You know, Johnson was no great shakes when it came to race relations, but I don't know that we've ever seen something so naked as we're, as we're seeing now in terms of the government, you know, funding this stuff. And in the coming days, Chuck Schumer has the ability, theoretically, to leverage that funding. But we will see. But in the meantime, we need our inspiration where we can get it. We have, I think it's five different segments. One is a speech from MLK that since the time I've been doing this podcast over the past 15, 16 years now, this speech was previously unheard of, at least in this, you know, in the, you know, since he was killed, it was released and we play it. And it is a speech on reparations. It's a speech on white economic anxiety and guaranteed income. It shows that the King that we get today very often sanitized and in some ways ghettoized to address only like, racial, specifically racial issues as opposed to a broader program of economic and social justice. After that, King's first interview, as it were, from the show the Open Mind, the New Negro. It was entitled this was in 1957. It was hosted by Professor Richard D. Hefner. You know, obviously, some of this is sort of like it was a little offensive these days. You'll also notice that, like, the level of, of, of discourse on television was quite different in those days. Then a speech delivered in April of 1967 at Riverside Church, just up the road here in New York City, entitled Beyond Vietnam. He obviously was active in fighting against US Involvement in Vietnam, but also, you know, talking about the implications here. And then his last speech, remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution, delivered at the national cathedral in Washington, D.C. in March of 1968. March 31st. Then Walter Cronkite reporting King's assassination in 1968. Sort of the the 60s version of Tony Dokapal. Who had both sides it I'm sure in that era. And of course King was biased and didn't both sides. It give both sides of the story. People angry on both sides. There was people angry on both sides. We need to live with each other. You know, how much did you know King contribute to, you know, making them do this, that type of thing. Walter Cronkite, just to give you a sense of. And you know, I don't know how many people in this country, what the population was in 68, probably around 200 some odd million. I would be surprised if anything less than a third watched that broadcast live. Less, you know, so we're talking tens of millions of people. And then finally Nina Simone performing the song why she performed it live three days following MLK's assassination at the at a Westbury Music Fair on Long Island. That's in April of 1968. This is a good thing to sit down with your kids and listen to. I make my kids listen to part of it each year. But it's also, it's good to just keep in your mind, you know, too often we, you know, there's a lot of this sort of like you watch 60 second clip on. On TV about Martin Luther King and that's it. And it just gets here. What a Republican. How a Republican interprets his exactly dreams. We'll be back alive tomorrow. Hang in there, Stay safe. Go talk to your neighbor, start to network, because if they're not there now, they will be soon. See you tomorrow.
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
So we suffer from a kind of poverty of the spirit, which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.
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Sam Cedar
The problem is, my friends.
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
That we have learned to fly the air like birds and we have learned to swim the seas like fish. And yet we have learned to walk the earth like brothers and sisters. Racial injustice is still the black man's burden and the white man's shame. So wherever we live in America, remember we have to face the fact honestly that racial discrimination is present. So don't get complacent.
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Sam Cedar
Certainly we made some strides.
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
We made some progress here and there, but it hadn't been enough. It hadn't been fast enough.
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Sam Cedar
And although we've come a long, long.
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Way, we still have a long, long way to go. In 1863, the Negro was freed from the bondage of physical slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln. But the Negro was not given any.
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Announcer/News Reporter
Land.
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
To make that freedom meaningful. And, you know, it was something like having a man in jail for years and years. And then you Suddenly discover that this man is innocent, Go to him and say, now you are free. That man been unjustly jailed for 35 or 40 years. And you just put him out of jail saying, now you are free. Don't give them any bus fare to get to town. No money to buy any clothes, no money to get something to eat. This is what happens to the black.
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Sam Cedar
Man in this country.
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
I can't limit my concern.
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Sam Cedar
To the middle class.
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
I can't limit my concern to this particular situation where a Negro comes and says, I'm the first. This. I'm just tired of the first Negro. I want some seconds and some thirds and some fourth. The Civil Rights movement has to address itself to this, and the nation has to do it. You see, we are such a rich nation and a fluent nation. We often don't see the poor. There are some. You see, most white people can't see the poor because they live in the suburbs. And then they get in town in these big cities on expressways. They don't know nothing about Watts. They never been there. They don't know anything about Huff in Cleveland or the west side or the south side of the Chicago or Harlem. They've never seen it. And they allow the poor to become invisible. And a lot of Negroes, you know, who have somehow sailed or floated out of the backwaters or the muddy waters and they've kind of been able to ease out into the fresh flowing waters of the mainstream have forgotten the stench of the backwater. And I can hear a voice saying, that wasn't enough. I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and you clothed me not. I needed shelter and you didn't give it to me. I needed a drink of water, and.
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Singer (Nina Simone)
In a while, that's three fourths water.
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
You made me pay a water bill.
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The open mind, free to examine, to question, to disagree. Our subject today, the new Negro. Your host on the Open Mind is Richard D. Hefner, author and historian.
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Richard D. Hefner
I think it's safe to say that a lot of the Negro in America has, throughout our history, deeply bothered the conscience of each and every one of us who deeply believes in traditional American principles of democracy and liberty and justice and freedom. I think this may be a little less true today than ever before. And yet, for the larger part of American history, I think we ought to realize that the Negro more or less was in slavery. I think the Negro was more likely to be a slave for the greater part of our history than not. And quite naturally, the attitude of the Negro towards the white of the white towards the Negro and of the Negro towards himself, has been conditioned and tempered and molded in very large part by the fact of a long history of slavery. Besides, I think it's important to remember that slavery as an institution put a premium not upon self assertiveness and the understanding of one's own human dignity, but upon acquiescence by the Negro's slave. And I think that one can fairly say that the acquiescent submissive Negro slave was generally, well, to put it very bluntly, generally safer than the self assertive Negro who is conscious of his own human dignity and of the democratic philosophy that is the American heritage. As a matter of fact, I think we could admit that the whole military myth that we have built up about the old south in which slavery existed, has been a myth in which we see the picture of the happy acquiescent slave. The Negro is a slave. The Negro who is acquiescent, acquiescent is happy. The Negro who is happy is by definition acquiescent. Negroes are happy because they accept their lot. And think of the movies and the books and the plays and the novels that we read and see about slavery in the old South. We see the Negro who is acquiescent as happy. The Negro slave who is self assertive, looks for his own rights, is considered a troublemaker. Even when slavery was brought to an end by the Civil War, it was said that acquiescence and acceptance by the Negro of his lot, all these were the greater part of wisdom. It was said that the Negro could gain more by submerging his own sense of dignity than by asserting it. Now that the Negro would so antagonize others by demanding his own rights that it was better for him to bide his time at each step along the way, wait for something to be given to him rather than demanded as of his own right. Well, men of goodwill, I think both Negro and white cannot deny that to some extent there is validity. But the degree of that extent, to what extent this is true is the question that we must face today. In recent years there have grown up leaders amongst both Negroes and whites who feel that a just and a wise self assertiveness is necessary on the part of the Negro. There has been emerging in our own times a new Negro, a Negro who is aware of his own dignity and of the American tradition of liberty and justice. We want to talk today about, about that new Negro, about who he is and what he is. And our guests are quite expert in the subject. My first guest is the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Of Montgomery, Alabama. Reverend King has been very much involved in the demand by the new Negro for his rights in the Negro bus boycott in Montgomery and in many other instances. My second guest is a jurist, Judge J. Wattes Waring, formerly federal judge in South Carolina, gentleman whose decisions in the area of segregation paved the way in a very real sense for what became in 1954 the Supreme Court's decision that segregation in our public schools is unconstitutional. Gentlemen, suppose we begin this discussion by letting me well first ask you, Dr. King, in your estimation, what and who is this new Negro?
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
I think I could best answer that question by saying first that the new Negro is a person with a new sense of dignity and destiny, with a new self respect. Along with that is this like of fear which once characterized the Negro. This willingness to stand up courageously for what he feels is just and what he feels he deserves on the basis of the laws of the land. I think also included would be this self assertive attitude that you just mentioned. And all of these factors come together to make what seems to me to be the new Negro. I think also I would like to mention this growing honesty which characterizes the Negro today. There was a time that the Negro used duplicity or deception to rather as a survival technique. Although he didn't particularly like conditions, he said he liked them because he felt that the boss wanted to hear that. But now from the housetops, from the kitchen, from the classrooms and from the pulpits, the Negro says in no uncertain terms that he doesn't like the way he's being treated. So at long last the Negro is telling the truth. And I think this is also one of the basic characteristics of the new Negro.
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Richard D. Hefner
Judge Waring, does this sound like an adequate description of the Negro whom you know today?
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Judge J. Wattes Waring
Honest Hefner? I think it's excellent. It's an excellent summary. My observation of the Negro, and I'm speaking of generalities of course, has been that up to recently he's been a half man or and now at last he's waking up to the fact that he's a whole man, that he's an American citizen and that he is entitled to rights no more, no less than just the ordinary run of the mill American citizen. He's never had that before, he hasn't been allowed to have it. He's been under political domination, he's been under stress, he's been, he's been under economic deprivations, he's been a servant, formerly a slave. And now suddenly I see the idea has come to him that he's really truly a man that can stand up on his own hind legs and tell the truth and say, I want not any special privilege. I don't want any special handout. I don't want to be given anything because the giving idea is all wrong. But I want a chance to become a full man and do my part, be it little or be it big in the community of our country.
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Richard D. Hefner
Doesn't this raise the question of tactics, though? You say you use the word honesty, you, you feel that honesty is. Are important here too. But as a matter of securing for the Negro his rights, do you feel that this aggressiveness, the self assertiveness, will get him more in the long run than going along with contemporary opinion and biding his time, taking step by step as he goes?
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
I think, I think it's better to be aggressive at this point. It seems to me that it is both historical and sociologically true that privileged classes do not give up their privileges voluntarily and they do not give them up without strong resistance. And all of the gains that have been made that we have received in the area of civil rights have come about because the Negroes stood up courageously for these rights and he was willing to aggressively press on. So I would think that it would be much better in the long run to stand up and be aggressive with understanding, goodwill and with a sense of discipline. Yet these things should not be substitutes for pressing on. And with this aggressive attitude, I believe that we will bring the gains or other civil rights into being much sooner than we were just standing idly by waiting for these things to be given voluntarily.
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Richard D. Hefner
What about the ill will that's generated by the aggressiveness? Certainly your own experience in Montgomery, you've been the target of bomb attacks, you've been the target of verbal and other kinds of violence. About the ill will that is generated by aggressiveness.
- [24:04]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Well, I think that is a necessary phase of the transition. Whenever oppressed people stand up for their rights and rise up against the oppressor, so to speak, the initial response of the oppressor is bitterness. That's true in most cases, I think, and that is what we are now experiencing in the south is this initial response of bitterness, which I hope will be transformed into a more brotherly attitude. We hope that the end will be redemption and reconciliation rather than division. But this, it seems to me, is a necessary phase of the transition from the old order of segregation and discrimination to the new order of freedom and justice. And this should not last forever. It's just something that's natural Right now. And as soon as we pass out of the shock period into the more creative period of adjustment, I think that bitterness and ill will pass away.
- [25:16]
Richard D. Hefner
This sounds, in a sense to be, if I may say this, in a sense to be a denial of the judicial process, saying we will work. The judicial process doesn't allow for the violent activity, the aggressiveness, and it means, in a sense, stepping outside, not outside the law, but outside that slow, step by step process that has been going on in the courts. Do you think, for instance, that the courts would have been moved to action that would have taken the place of your boycott in Montgomery had you not acted? Do you think there could be a substitute for that kind of action?
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
I think not. I. I think it was necessary to do it. I think it was. The time was right, and I don't think there could have been a substitute at that particular time.
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Richard D. Hefner
Do you think that the judicial structure.
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Judge J. Wattes Waring
I want to say something on that. I. I think undoubtedly the action that Mr. King and his friends took in Montgomery was fine, necessary and effective. Remember, the courts don't go out as an executive branch of the government should and do things for you. The court declares what your rights are, and the court says to you, you're an American citizen. Now, of course, if you are scared and hide in a closet and don't exercise the rights of American citizens, the court can't turn around and say, you've got to do it. The courts have declared the rights. And I think that the supreme court decision of May 17, 1954, was the greatest thing that's happened in this country in many, many decades. And I think that it declared. It declared, in effect, that segregation, legal segregation, segregation by law is illegal and not a part of the American state system. And all the people, the big people and the little people throughout this land have awakened to the fact that they have a right. Now, remember this. It's not a matter of giving rights. Rights aren't given. The right to vote isn't given to you. It's yours and it belongs to you. And the Negro people are beginning to realize that they are ordinary human beings and American citizens, and they have these rights. And the courts have told them so. Now it's up to them to move out. They haven't got to go out with guns and bombs and bayonets, but they've got to go out with determination and courage and steadfastness, like this man Luther King has done, and say, here am I, and I stand here on my rights, and it's good to prevail it's got to prevail and it can't be beaten. If we have enough of them who are steadfast enough, when they begin to compromise and sell out on principle, then they're gone. Now it's a matter of strategy is to keep a complete solid front. There may be tactics as to whether you want to make bus cases first or school cases or railroad cases or things of that kind. Those are minorities details. But the strategy is you must never surrender any of the right to gain and you must look forward to the attainment of full equality.
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Richard D. Hefner
Well, I know that's your strategy. What about future tactics?
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Where do you go from here? Well, that's a pretty difficult question to answer at this point since in Montgomery we have not worked out any future plans, that is in any chronological order. We are certainly committed to work and press on until segregation is non existent in Montgomery and all over the South. We are committed to full equality and doing away with injustice wherever we find it. But as to the next move, I don't have the answer for that because we have not work that out at this point. We I guess have been so involved in the bus situation until we have not had had the real time to sit down and think about next move. But in a general sense we are committed to achieving first class citizenship in every area of life in Montgomery and throughout the southern community.
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Richard D. Hefner
Well, to what extent this is a question that has occurred to me. I wondered to what extent the judicial decision of May 1954 stimulated a greater feeling of self respect amongst Negroes and intensified in them a willingness to assert their demands.
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
I think it had a tremendous impact and influence on the Negro and bring about this new self respect. I think it certainly is one of the major factors, not the only. I think several other forces and historical circumstances must be brought into the picture. The fact that circumstances made it necessary for the Negro to travel more so that his rural plantation background was gradually supplanted by a more urban industrial life. Illiteracy was gradually passing away. And with the growth of the cultural life of the Negro that brought about new self respect and economic growth and also the tremendous impact of the world situation. With people all over the world seeking freedom from colonial powers and imperialism. These things all came together. And then with the decision of May 17, 1954 we gained the culminating point that it seems to me was the final point which came and to bring all of these things together. And that gave this new negro a new self respect which we see all over the south and all over the nation today.
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Richard D. Hefner
Well, if this was a final point, point, in a sense, a culminating point, why do you ask now for another act on a national level, an act, let's say, on the part of the President, for a speech in the South? Why is this so important? Haven't enough steps been made up to this point to enable you to carry the ball from here on?
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Well, I think it's necessary for all of the forces possible to be working to implement and enforce the decisions that are handed down by the courts. And so often in the area of civil rights, it seems that the judicial branch of the government is fighting the battle alone. And we feel that the executive and legislative branches of the government have a basic responsibility. And at points these branches have been all too silent and all too stagnant in their moves to implement and enforce the decisions. With the popularity of the President and his tremendous power and influence, just a word from him could do a great deal to ease the situation, calm emotions and give southern white liberals something to stand on. If it is nothing but something to quote, the southern white liberal stands in a pretty difficult position because he does not have anywhere to turn for emotional security. Similar to what hate groups? I mean, the things that other groups have to turn to, the hate organizations, so to speak. But with a word from the President of the United States, with his power and influence, it would give a little more courage and backbone to the white liberals in the south who are, who are willing to be allies in the struggle with the Negro for first class citizenship.
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Richard D. Hefner
Now, to what extent, Let me ask you this question, Judge Waring. Are white Southerners willing to be, to be allies in the battle of the new Negro?
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Judge J. Wattes Waring
That's a very hard question, question to answer. There are very, very few that are willing to come out in the open and say so. There are a great many in my opinion who would be glad if they are made to do it. I think that there are lots of people. I sometimes use the expression that the little boy with a dirty face won't go and wash, but if you grab him by the neck and scrub his face, he then boasts he's got the cleanest face in the gang. And I think there are many of the people in the south and I saw many of them. My experience was that officially I was quite heated and condemned because I had, I had expressed my views to what I thought the laws of land were. And I got a lot of telephone messages, messages and anonymous letters saying they agreed with me, but they couldn't tell me why or how or who they were. And those people want to be freed. But the overall picture of the politicians, no politician himself is going to dare come out and take this position of his own volition. But if the President of the United States tells him he's going to fall in line and if we can get the top executive people to take action, we'll get somewhere. Remember this now the Supreme Court has laid down the law and said what's constitutional now that's important, that's most important. It's the biggest thing that's ever happened. But it's got to be activated, it's got to be worked out. And the executive position department has got to manipulate and work it and enforce it. And the legislative department should give the executive department more power to work and enforce these laws.
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Richard D. Hefner
You feel that action, then you do too feel that action has to be taken on this level?
- [36:03]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Oh yes, very definitely.
- [36:06]
Richard D. Hefner
Let me ask again though, about the feelings of the southern whites. How do you evaluate, if you had to give a progress report, how would.
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Judge J. Wattes Waring
You evaluate the battle you've fought over.
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Richard D. Hefner
This past year in terms of Southern feelings, terms of northern white feelings too?
- [36:23]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Well, I think we have seen, we've been able to see mixed emotions at this point. For instance, over, from a national point of view, looking all over the nation, we have had tremendous response and real genuine sympathy from many, many white persons. And naturally we've had the sympathy of Negroes. But many, many white persons of goodwill all over the nation have given moral support and a great deal of encouragement. And that has been very encouraging to us. In the struggle now in the South, I guess the lines are more closely drawn. You find on the one hand a group more determined now than ever before because it is a last ditch struggle to do anything, even if it means using violence to block all of the intentions and the desires of the Negro to achieve first class citizenship. But there are also others who have expressed sympathy. There are white southerners even in Montgomery who have been quite sympathetic. As Judge Waring just said, sometimes these people because of fear, refuse to say anything about it. They stand back because of fear of economic, social and political reprisals. But there is a silent sympathy. We have seen a great deal of that in Montgomery. So that it's two sides. There's this side where you get the negative response, the other side where you have the positive response. And I have seen both. And I think as time goes on, the negative side will get smaller and smaller and those who are willing to be open minded and accept the trends of the ages will grow into a majority group rather than A minority.
- [38:24]
Richard D. Hefner
You don't feel that there'll be any violent reaction then over a long range point of view to the progress that has been made?
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Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
No, I don't. I think the violence will be temporary. Maybe. I don't say it will end tomorrow. We will go through some more for the next few months. So. But I think once we are over the shock period, that shock will be absorbed and Southerners will come to the point of seeing that the best thing to do is to sit down and work out these problems and do it in a very Christian spirit. I think the violence that we are undergoing now is indicative of the fact that the die hards realize that they are on their standing at the dying point, that is the system is at its dying point and that this is a last way to try to hold on to the old order.
- [39:25]
Judge J. Wattes Waring
All great reforms have periods of trouble. Gandhi was murdered, Jesus was crucified. And you find that most great reforms have certain periods of stress and distress. Now, just one last point I want to make. When we speak of the law, it's terribly important that we bring these cases and have a declaration of law and action by Congress and action by the executive. Because now or up to the time of the Supreme Court's decision, segregation was legal and segregation, even people of goodwill in the south said, but the law says we have to keep these people circle. For instance, it has been illegal for me to ride in a bus with Mr. King here. Now, I don't want a law that says I've got to ride with him or he's got to ride with me, but I don't want a law that says I can't sit in a seat with him. And we've broken that. And that's an enormous advantage. And we've got to do it on every stage right down the line. The Congress of the United States, I believe. I've been very cynical and skeptical about it, but I'm beginning to believe they're going to do a little something this time. And if they do a little something, they haven't done anything in 75 years. If they do a little something this time, they'll do a little more next year. And the President of the United States and the officials in the administration will begin to see that if you, if Congress is moving, it's good politics to move and that'll have a great motivating product. On the, on the national picture, I think we are, we are going forward. We are going forward inexorably. We've got to win. That's a Question whether we're going to win in a short time or long term.
- [41:24]
Richard D. Hefner
For the short term, how do you project this into the immediate future?
- [41:28]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Well, I.
- [41:29]
When I think of the question of progress in the area of race relations, I prefer to be realistic. And when I say that, I mean I try to look at it not from the pessimistic point of view or the optimistic, but rather from the realistic point of view. I think we've come a long, long way, but we have a long, long way to go. But it seems to me that if we will press on with determination, moral courage and yet wise restraint and calm reasonableness, in a few years, we will reach the goal. I have a great deal of faith in the future and the outcome. I am not disparate.
- [42:09]
Richard D. Hefner
And I'm sure as long as we have men like you, we can all have faith. Thank you so much, Reverend King, Judge Waring. Next week we'll give a summary report of civil rights over the past year. Gentlemen, I think that it went very, very nicely.
- [42:23]
Sam Cedar
We are very quick.
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Announcer/News Reporter
WRCA has just presented the open mind.
- [42:43]
Sam Cedar
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight.
- [42:59]
Announcer/News Reporter
And.
- [42:59]
Sam Cedar
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. Comminger and Rabbi Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. 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. It is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great poetry. 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 statement 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 and 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 called us is the most difficult one. Even when pressed by the divine 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 surroundings 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. We must rejoice as well, for sure, that 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 descent 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. 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 quick 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 here inquiries have not really known 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 misunderstandings, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly and I trust concisely, while I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate, leads clearly through 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 Day. 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 on the National Liberation Front, paragons of virtue. Not 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 what 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. That is, at the outset, a very obvious and almost fascinating 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. During the poverty slogan, there were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program, broken and eviscerated as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energy 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 the place, and it became clear to me that the war was going 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 in sending them 8,000 miles to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harvard. So we have been repeatedly faced with the curl iron watching negro and white boys on TV stream, and they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watched them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village. But we realized that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I cannot be silent in the patience of such fro 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 in 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 non violent action. But they ask, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation was as using massive doses of violence to solve its problem, 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 ghetto 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 bonds, I cannot be silent. For those who ask the question, are 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 a sage from itself until the descendants of his slaves loose completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way, we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Holland who had written earlier, oh 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 reach Vietnam. It can never be saved so so long as it destroys the people's 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 get happy 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. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was Meant for all men. For Communists, capitalists, 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 tomorrow as a feast minister of this one? And I threatened them with death. Must I not share with them my life? Finally, as I tried 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, a nation, a 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 to night 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 forceless, for the victims of our nation to those it calls enemy. For no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brother. And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and such within myself are 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 hunter inside gone. 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 liberals. Vietnamese people proclaim their own independence in 1954. In 1945, brother, 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 documented freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its conquest of a farmer colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence. 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 luck. But by clearly indigenous forces that included some countries. For the peasants, this new government meant real land reform. One of the most important needs in their lives. 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 80% of the French war cause. Even before the French were defeated at Vin 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 moved. Soon we would be paying almost the full cost 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. Then stared back came the United States. Determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation. The peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed. His Diem ruthlessness of rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. Peasants watched as all of this was presided over by United States interns. Then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. 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 with 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 bonds 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. In the concentration camps where minimal social needs are rally met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs. So they go. Primarily women and children and ages. They watch as we poison that water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roared through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wandered into the hospitals with at least 20 casualties from American firepower. For one Viet Cong 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 if we allow 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 claim to be built? Is is it among these bossless ones? We have destroyed that two most cherished institutions. The family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crescent of the nation's only non communist revolutionary political force. The Unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women, children, killed their men. Now that is little left to build on, save thickness. Soon the only solid, solid physical foundations remaining. Will be found at our military bases. And in the concrete of the concentration camps we call fortified hamlets. Peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. But we blame them for such thoughts. We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These two are our brothers. Perhaps the more difficult, for no best necessary task. Is to speak to those who have been designated as our enemies. What is the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call VC of Communists? What must they think of the United States of America? And they realize that we permitted the repressions and the cruelty of the deeds. 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 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? For now we charge them with violence after. 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 appear destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts. How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than 25% 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 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 hunter. And they're 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. Then show it up from the power of new violence? Yet is a 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 in profit. From the wisdom of the brothers who are call the opposition. So too, with Hanoi in the north. Where our bombs now pummel the land and our minds endangered 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 cost. And then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled. Between the 13th and 17th 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. They realized they had been betrayed again. And we ask why they do not leap to negotiate. These things must be remembered.
- [71:53]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Also.
- [71:54]
Sam Cedar
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. And they remind us that they did not begin to see send troops in large numbers and even supplies to the South. Until American forces had moved into the tens of. And Nora remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth. About the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace. How the president claimed that non existed. When they had clearly been made forcing nothing. Man has watched as America has spoken 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 of bombing and shelling and mining we are doing a 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 800 8,000 miles away from its shoulders. 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 and Vietnam to understand the arguments of those who are called enemy. I am as deeply concerned about our own troops bad 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 the 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 security cure. 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 beings of the I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes and homes. 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 increases and the heart of the Vietnamese and then the 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 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. 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. We do not stop our war against people of Vietnam immediately. The world would 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 elders 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 we began the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict. Number one, end all bombing in north and South Vietnam.
- [77:36]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Number two.
- [77:37]
Sam Cedar
Declare a unilateral ceasefire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiations. Three, take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos. 4. 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.
- [78:14]
Narrator/Host
5.
- [78:14]
Sam Cedar
Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement. Part of our own gun. Ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under the 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.
- [79:09]
Announcer/News Reporter
Meanwhile.
- [79:10]
Sam Cedar
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 70 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. I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectives. 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 of 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 that 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. If we ignore this sober reality.
- [81:51]
Narrator/Host
And.
- [81:52]
Sam Cedar
If we ignore this sober, sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing clergy and laymen concern 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 we will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant, significant and profound change in American life and policy. 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 10 years we have seen emerge in pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of US military advisers in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investment accounts for the counter revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia, why NURB and napalm and green raid 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 a 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, revolution. We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. 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 trim bits 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. 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 restraint, structure. True revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with a righteous indignation. It will look across, cross 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, know no concern for the social betterment of the countries and say this is not just. It will look at our alignment with the landed generous if South America and say this is not just. 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 hands on the world order and say of war. This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of people's nominees. Singing 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 and on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, and well lead the way in this revolution of values that 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's 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. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs and nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and through their misguided passions urge the United States to relinquish the its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anti communism, but rather in a positive thirst 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 all old systems of exploitation and Oppression. And out of the wounds of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. Shirtless and barefoot, people of the land are rising up as never before. People who set in darkness have seen a great light. We in the west must support these revolutions. It is a sad fact that because of conflict, 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 anti revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism as a revolutionary spirit, therefore communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiate. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility, poverty, racism and militarism. This powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust morays 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. Genuine revolution 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, embracing an 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 has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love, I'm not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I'm not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I'm 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 St. John. Let us love one another. Yes, 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 loved. 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. 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 records from nations and individuals that pursues his self defeating path of hate. As Arnold Conder 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. Unfortunately, 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 that 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 the lost opportunity, tired in the affairs of men does not remain at flooded ebbs we may crowd 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. Written with the vetic words too late. That is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam's right moving finger rights and having writ, moves on. We still have a choice today. Nonviolent coexistence, a violent co annihilation. 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. 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. So 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 rival as poor men? And we send our deepest regrets. Will there be another message of long hope, of solidarity with their journeys, 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 is that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell. Elephant mistake Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide. In the strife of truth and falsehood, for the good evil side some great cause. God's new messiah often eats the gloom of life and the choice goes by forever twixt that darkness, though the cause of evil prosper yet is truth alone is strong, though her portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong, yet that scaffold sways the future behind them. Unknown standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. If we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative storm of peace. We will make the right choice. We will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. 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 stre.
- [98:32]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here this morning to have the opportunity of standing in this very great and significant pulpit. It is always a rich and rewarding experience to take a brief break from our day to day demands in the struggle for freedom and human dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned friends of goodwill all over our nation. And certainly it is always.
- [99:21]
A deep.
- [99:22]
And meaningful experience to be in a worship service. And so for many reasons, I'm happy to be here today. I would like to use as a subject from which to preach this morning, remaining awake through a great revolution. The text for the morning is found in the Book of Revelation. There are two passages there that I would like to quote. It's in the 16th chapter of that book. Behold, I make all things new Farmer. Things are passed away. I'm sure that most of you have read that arresting little story from the pen of Washington Irving entitled Ribbon Van Winkle. The one thing that we usually remember about the story is that Rip Van Winkle slept 20 years. But that is another point in that little story that is almost always completely overlooked. It was a sign in the inn from which Rip went up in the mounting for his long sleep. When Rip Van Winkle went up in the mounting, the sign had a picture of King George III of England. When he came down 20 years later, the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first President of the United States. Rip Van Winkle looked up at the picture of George Washington. But in looking at the picture, he was amazed. He was completely lost. He knew not who he was. And this reveals to us that the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that Rip slept 20 years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain, a revolution was taking place that at points would change the course of history. And Rip knew nothing about it. He was asleep. Yes, he slept through a revolution. One of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change. And yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses that the new situation demands, and they end up sleeping through a revolution. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that the great revolution has taken place in the world today in the sense it is a triple revolution. That is a technological revolution with the impact of automation and cyber nation. Then that is a revolution in weaponry with the emergence of of atomic and nuclear weapons, of warfare. Then that is the human rights revolution with the freedom explosion that has taken place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place. And that is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying Behold, I make all things new. Far more things are passed away now. Whenever anything new comes into history, it brings with it new challenges and new opportunities. And I would like to deal with the challenges that we face today as a result of this triple revolution that has taken place in the world today. First, we are challenged to develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone. And anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. And the challenge that we face today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood. Now it's true that the geographical oneness of this age has come into being to a large extent through modern man's scientific ingenuity. Modern man, through his scientific genius, has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains. And our jet planes have compressed into minutes. Distances at once took weeks and even months. All of this tells us that our world is a neighborhood. Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood. And yet we have not had the ethical commitment to to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow and in some way we've got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers, or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. For some strange reason. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God's universe is made. This is the way it is structured. John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms. No man is an island in tithe itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. And he goes on toward the end to say, any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind. Therefore, never sin to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee. We must see this, believe this, and live by it if we are to remain awake through a great revolution. Secondly, we are challenged to eradicate the last vestiges of racial injustice from our nation. I must say this morning that racial injustice is still the black man's burden and the white man's shame. It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans. Spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not so settled. The disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelittingly to get rid of the disease of racism. Something positive must be done. Everyone must share in the guilt as individuals and as institutions. The government must certainly share the guilt. Individuals must share the guilt. Even the church must share the guilt. We must face the Sad fact at 11 o' clock on Sunday morning when we stand to sing in Christ, there is no east nor West. We stand in the most segregated hour of America. The hour has come for everybody and for all institutions of the public sector and the private sector to work to get rid of racism. Now, if we are to do it, we must honestly admit certain things and get rid of certain myths that have constantly been disseminated all over our nation. One is the myth of time. It is the notion that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice. And there are those who often sincerely say to the Negro and his allies in the white community, why don't you slow up? Stop pushing things so fast. Only time can solve the problem. And if you will just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out. That is an answer to that myth, and it is a time is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. I'm sorry to say this morning that I'm absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme righteous of our nation, the people on the wrong side, have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation, not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people. People who sit around and say, wait on time. Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize that the time is always right to do right. Now that is another myth that still gets around. It is a kind of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. And there are those who still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of slum conditions.
- [113:07]
Announcer/News Reporter
If.
- [113:07]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
He is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And, and so they say, the Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps. They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the nation made the black man's color a stigma. But beyond this, they never stopped to realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery 244 years. In 1863, the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted.
- [114:31]
Narrator/Host
It.
- [114:32]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
And you just go up to him and say, now you are free. But you don't give him any bus fare to get to town. You don't give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life. Every code of jurisprudence would rise up against this. And yet this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, you're free. And it left them there, penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of it all is that at the same time, the nation failed to do anything for the black.
- [115:14]
Announcer/News Reporter
Man.
- [115:17]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Through an act of congress. It was giving away millions of acres of land in the west and the middle west, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. But not only did it give the land, it built land grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, as the years unfolded, it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize our farms. And to this day, thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every year not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country. And there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all of the aspects effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice. That is another thing closely related to racism that I would like to mention as another challenge. We are challenged to rid our nation in the world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world. Two thirds of the peoples of the world go to bed hungry tonight. Their ill howls. They are ill nourished. They are shabbily clad. I've seen it in Latin America. I've seen it in Africa. I've seen this poverty in Asia. I remember some years ago, Mrs. King and I journeyed to that great country known as India. And I never will forget the experience. It was a marvelous experience to meet and talk with the great leaders of India, to meet and talk with and speak to thousands and thousands of people all over that vast country. These experiences will remain dear to me as long as the cords of memory shall lengthen. But I say to you this morning, my friends, are those dependent, depressing moments. How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at night? How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes God's children sleeping on the sidewalks at night? In Bombay, more than a million people sleep on the sidewalks every night. In Calcutta, more than 600,000 sleep on the sidewalks every night. They have no beds to sleep in. They have no houses to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out of India's population, more than 500 million people, some 480 million, make an annual income of less than $90 a year. And most of them have never seen a doctor or dentist? As I noticed these things, something within me cried out, can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned and an answer came, oh, no. Because the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India and every other nation. And I started thinking of the fact that we spend in America millions of dollars a day to store surplus food. And I said to myself, I know where we can store that food free of charge in the wrinkled stomach of the millions of got children all over the world who go to bed hungry at night. And maybe we spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding. Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own nation There are about 40 million people who are poverty stricken. I have seen them here and there. I've seen them in the ghettos of the North. I've seen them in the rural areas of the South. I've seen them in Appalachia. I've just been in the process of touring many areas of our country. And I must confess that in some situations I have literally found myself crying. I was in Marks, Mississippi the other day, which is in Quitman county, the poorest county in the United States. I tell you, I saw hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear. I saw their mothers and their fathers trying to carry on a little Head Start program. But they had no money, the federal government hadn't funded them. And they were trying to carry on and they raised a little money here and there, trying to get a little food to feed the children, trying to teach them a little something. And I saw mothers and fathers who said to me, not only were they unemployed, but they didn't get any kind of income. No age, pension, no welfare check or anything. I said, how do you live? They say, well, we go around. Go around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the bear season comes, we pick berries. When the rabbit season comes, we hunt and catch a few rabbits. And that's about it. And I was in Newark and Hollam just this week. And I walked into the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions, no, not with wall to wall carpet, but wall to wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment. This welfare mother said to me, the landlord will not repair this place. I've been here two years. He hadn't made a single repair. She pointed out her little boy who was a victim of lead poisoning. She pointed out the walls with all of the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes where the rats came in. And she said, night after night we have to stay awake Keep the rats and the roaches from getting to the children. I said, how much do you pay for this apartment? She said, $125. And I looked and I thought and said to myself, it isn't worth $60. Poor people are forced to pay more for less, living in conditions day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the tragedy is, so often these 40 million people are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich, because our expressways carry us away from the ghetto, we don't see the poor. Jesus told a parable one day.
- [124:43]
Poet/Singer
And.
- [124:43]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
He reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn't see the poor. His name was Diabes. He was a rich man. There was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man. But not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body. He was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, dives went to hell. And there was a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Ivies. And that is nothing in that parable which says that Davies went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him and he advised him to sell all. But in that instance, Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth the universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell. And on the other end of that line, long distance called between heaven and hell, was Abraham in heaven talking to Davies in hell. Now, Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his days. So it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven. It was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Diabetes didn't go to hell because he was rich. Diabetes didn't realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Diabetes went to hell because he passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Davies went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Davies went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty. This can happen to America, the richest nation in the world. There's nothing wrong with that. This is America's opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have nots. And the question is whether America will do it. There's nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources the to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will. In a few weeks, some of us are coming to Washington to see if the will is still alive or if it is alive in this nation. We are coming to Washington in a poor people's campaign. Yes, we're going to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We're going to bring those who have known long years of hurt and neglect. We're going to bring those who've come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign. We're going to bring children and adults and old people, people who've never seen a doctor or dentist in their lives. We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We're not coming to tab Washington. We are coming to demand.
- [129:21]
Sam Cedar
That the.
- [129:21]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
The government will address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day. We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. That among these a life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But if a man doesn't have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty and the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists. We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promised sorry note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic non violent action to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment. To make the invisible visible. Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action. Great documents are here to tell us something should be done. We met here some years ago in the White House Conference on Civil Rights and we came out with the same recommendations that we will be demanding in our campaign here. But nothing has been done. The President's Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress recommended these things some time ago. Nothing has been done. Even the Urban Coalition, made up of mayors of most of the cities of our country, the leading businessmen have said that these things should be done. Nothing has been done. The Kerner Commission came out with its report just a few days ago and then made specific recommendations. Nothing has been done. And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwill put their bodies and their souls in motion. And it will be the kind of sole force that brought into being as a result of this confrontation that I believe will make the difference. Yes, it will be a poor people's campaign. This is a question facing America. Ultimately, a great nation is a compassionate nation. America has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor. One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we've done. Yes, we will be able to save. We build gargantuan bridges to span the seas. We build gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our scientific and technological power. It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, that was not enough. But I was hungry and ye fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in. And ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently ye cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these my brethren, ye do it unto me. That's a question facing America today. And I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through a revolution. President Kennedy said on one occasion, mankind must put an end to war. A war will put an end to mankind. The world must hear this. I pray God that America will hear this before it is too late. Because today we are fighting a war. I'm convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in war in Vietnam has torn up Geneva accord. It has strengthened the military industrial complex. It has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self determination of the vast majority of Vietnamese people and put us in a position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor. It has played havoc with our domestic destinies. This day we are spending $500,000 to kill every Vietcong soldier. Every time we kill one, we spend about $500,000 while we spend only $53 a year for every person characterized by is poverty Stricken in the so called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty. Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are, 10,000 miles away from home, fighting for the so called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we've not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. And yet when they come back home, they can't hardly live on the same block together. The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There's not a single major ally to the United States of America that would dare send a troop to Vietnam. And so the only friends that we have now, and a few client nations like Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea and a few others, this is where we are. Mankind must put an end to war. A war will put an end to mankind. And the best way to start is to put an end to the war in Vietnam. Because if it continues, we will inevitably come to, to the point of confronting China, which could lead the whole world to nuclear annihilation. It is no longer the choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or non existence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation. And our earthly habitat will be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine. This is why I felt the need of raising my voice against that war and working wherever I can to arouse the conscience of our nation on it. I remember so well when I first took a stand against the war in Vietnam. The critics took me on and they had their say in the most negative and sometimes most vicious way. One day a newsman came to me and said, Dr. King, don't you think you're going to have to stop? Stop now opposing the war and move more in line with the administration's policy. Because I understand that it has hurt the budget of your organization. And people who once respect you have lost respect. People who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don't you feel that you really got to change your position? I looked at him and I had to say, sir, I'm sorry, you don't know Me, I'm not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or by taking a sort of gallop poll of the majority opinion. Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a mold of consensus on some positions expedient. A cowardice asks the question is expedient. And then expediency comes along and asks the question, is it politics? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right? There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular. But he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. And I believe today that is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, we ain't gonna study war no more. This is the challenge facing modern man. Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the struggle for justice and peace. But I will not yield to a politic of despair. I'm going to maintain hope as we come to Washington. In this campaign, the cards are stacked against us. This time we will really confront a Goliath. God grant that we will be that David of Truth set out against the Goliath of injustice, the Goliath of neglect, the Goliath of refusing to deal with the problems and go on with the determination to make America the truly great America that it is called to be. I say to you that our goal is freedom. And I believe we're going to get there. Because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is free freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be as a people, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America. Before the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth, we were here before death of the nets. Across the pages of history, the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence. We were here before the beautiful words of the Star Spangled Banner were written. We were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored here without wages. They made cotton king and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions. And yet out of a bottomless vitality, they continued to grow and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn't stand stop us, the opposition that we now face will surely fail. We're going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the Almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. And so, however dark it is however deep the angry feelings are and the violent explosions are, I can still sing we shall overcome. We shall overcome because the ark of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. We shall overcome because Carlisle is right, no lie can live forever. We shall overcome because William Conard Bryant is right. Truth, Christ will rise again. We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. As we were singing earlier today, truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future. And behind the dim unknown standeth God within the shadow keeping watch above his own. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mounting of despair to stone hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. Thank God for John, who centuries ago out on a lonely obscure island called Patmos, caught vision of the new Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God, who heard a voice saying, behold, I make all things new. Far more things have passed away. God grant that we will be participants in this newness and this magnificent development. If we will but do it, we will bring about a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace. And that day the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy. God bless you.
- [145:10]
Sam Cedar
Direct from our newsroom in Washington. In color, this is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and Russ Hodge in Memphis, Tennessee, Dan Rather in New York, Bernard Kalb in Saigon, Marvin Kalb in Wellington, New Zealand and Burt Quint in Khe Sanh, South Vietnam.
- [145:31]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Good evening.
- [145:32]
Announcer/News Reporter
Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of non violence in the civil rights movement has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. Police have issued an all points bulletin for a well dressed young white man seen running from the scene. Officers also reportedly chased and fired on a radio equipped car containing two white men. Dr. King was standing on the balcony of a second floor hotel room tonight when according to in a companion, a shot was fired from across the street. In the friend's words, the bullet exploded in his face. Police who have been keeping a close watch over the Nobel Peace Prize winner because of Memphis turbulent racial situation were on the scene almost immediately. They rushed the 39 year old Negro leader to a hospital where he died of a bullet wound in the neck. Police said they found a high power hunting rifle about a block from the hotel, but it was not immediately identified as the murder weapon. Mayor Henry Loeb has reinstated the dusk to dawn curfew he imposed on the city last week when a March led by Dr. King erupted in violence. Violence. Governor Buford Ellington has called out 4,000 National Guardsmen and police report that the murder has touched off sporadic acts of violence in a negro section of the city. International address. President Johnson expressed the nation's shock.
- [146:50]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
America is shocked and saddened by the brutal slaying tonight of Dr. Martin Luther King. I ask every citizen to reject the blind violence that has struck Dr. King, who lived by non violence.
- [147:11]
Announcer/News Reporter
Dr. King had returned to Memphis only yesterday, determined to prove that he could lead a peaceful mass march in support of striking sanitation workers, most of whom are Negroes. Dr. King had this to say last night about the situation in Memphis.
- [147:28]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic first amendment privileges because they haven't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.
- [148:01]
Announcer/News Reporter
There was shock in Harlem tonight when word of Dr. King's murder reached the nation's largest negro community. Men, women and children poured into the streets. They appeared dazed. Many were crying. A young Negro said Dr. King didn't really have to go back to Memphis. Maybe he wanted to prove something.
- [148:18]
Poet/Singer
We want to do a tune written for today, for this hour for Dr. Martin luther King. We stated before that the whole program is dedicated to his memory. But this tune is written about him and for him. And so we had yesterday to learn it and show him him. Once upon this planet earth live the man Humble, reaching love and freedom fought his fellow man he was dreaming of the day Peace would come to earth to stay and he spread this message all across the land. Turn the other cheek he'd bleed.
- [149:59]
Singer (Nina Simone)
Love.
- [149:59]
Poet/Singer
Thy neighbor was his creed Pain, humiliation.
- [150:08]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Death.
- [150:10]
Singer (Nina Simone)
He did not dread. With his mama at his side.
- [150:23]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
From.
- [150:23]
Poet/Singer
His foes he did not hide. It's hard to think this great man is dead oh yeah. Well the murders never cease.
- [150:58]
Singer (Nina Simone)
All they.
- [150:59]
Poet/Singer
Mean are une beyond what do they.
- [151:06]
Singer (Nina Simone)
Ever hope Ever hope to gain?
- [151:14]
Poet/Singer
Will my country.
- [151:19]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Fall?
- [151:21]
Singer (Nina Simone)
Stand up.
- [151:24]
Poet/Singer
Is it too late for us all? And did Martin Luther King just died in vain. Because he'd seen mountain top and he knew he couldn't not stop Always living with the threat of death ahead. Folks you better.
- [152:14]
Singer (Nina Simone)
Stop and think.
- [152:18]
Poet/Singer
Cause we're headed for the frame.
- [152:24]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
What will happen now?
- [152:28]
Poet/Singer
And he is dead. He was for equality for all people. You drink full of love and goodwill.
- [152:53]
Singer (Nina Simone)
Hate was not his way. He was not a violent man.
- [153:08]
Poet/Singer
Razor tree that sealed his face.
- [153:15]
Richard D. Hefner
We.
- [153:15]
Singer (Nina Simone)
Can all shed tears but it won't change a thing. Teach your people will they ever learn? Must you always kill with Burn and burn with guns and kill with.
- [153:41]
Poet/Singer
Don't you know how we got the reaction? Don't you know what it will bring? But he had seen the mountaintop. And he knew he could not stop.
- [154:05]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Always living always.
- [154:08]
Poet/Singer
With a threat of death ahead.
- [154:16]
Singer (Nina Simone)
Folks you'd better stop and faint. Everybody knows we're on the brink.
- [154:30]
Poet/Singer
One book happened now that the king did go see he'd seen the mountaintop. And he knew he could not stop. Always living with a threat of death ahead.
- [155:06]
Singer (Nina Simone)
Folks you better stop and think and feel again While we're headed for the brain what's gonna happen now? And all of a sudden our cities my people are rising, they're living in lies. Even if they have to die. Even if they have to die at the moment that they know what life is. Yeah.
- [155:51]
Poet/Singer
Even at that one moment that you know what life is.
- [155:56]
Singer (Nina Simone)
If you have to die, it's all right. Cause you know what life is. You know what freedom is for one moment of your life.
- [156:12]
Sam Cedar
What's gonna happen.
- [156:18]
Singer (Nina Simone)
Now that the king of love is there.
- [156:47]
Narrator/Host
It.
- [157:18]
Poet/Singer
I heard that we've heard all kinds of stories, but I heard that this was his favorite song pieced at the near the end of his life last year. A year ago, maybe more longer than that now. Lorraine Hansberry left us and she was a dear friend and she had her favorite song. The Langston Hughes left us. Cold Chain left us. Otis Redding left us. You can go on. Do you realize how many we have lost? Then it really gets down to reality, doesn't it? Not a performance, not microphones and all that crap, but really something else. We have lost a lot of them in the last two years, but we have remaining. Monk Miles.
- [158:44]
Sam Cedar
I love you too.
- [158:55]
Poet/Singer
And of course for those that we have left, we're thankful. But we can't fought any more losses.
- [159:04]
Sam Cedar
Oh no.
- [159:05]
Poet/Singer
Oh my God. They're shooting us down one by one.
- [159:10]
Sam Cedar
Don't forget that.
- [159:13]
Poet/Singer
Because they are killing us one by one. Well, all I have to say is that those of us who know how to protect those of us that we love, stand by them and stay close to them. And I say that if there had been a couple of more a little closer to Dr. King, he wouldn't have got it, you know, really just a little closer to him. Stay there, Stay there. We can't afford any more losses. He had seen mountaintop and he knew.
- [160:14]
Singer (Nina Simone)
He could not stop. Always living with a threat. Devil. Hey, come on.
- [160:30]
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
Folks.
- [160:31]
Singer (Nina Simone)
You better stop and then.
- [160:35]
Sam Cedar
I will.
- [160:35]
Singer (Nina Simone)
Almost do the brain. What will happen now that the king of love is there?