Vietnam
April 4, 1967. New York, N.Y.
Mr.
Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted
I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing
your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning
out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great
honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi
Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our
nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside
Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching
here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding
experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit.
I come
to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves
me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest
agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought
us together, Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements
of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and
I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A
time comes when silence is betrayal.” That time has come for us
in relation to Vietnam.
The
truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they
call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of
inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s
policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without
great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within
one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the
issues at hand seem as perplexing as they often do in the case of this
dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by
uncertainty. But we must move on.
Some
of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have
found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we
must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate
to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well,
for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that
a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond
the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent
based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps
a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements,
and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance,
for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems
so close around us.
Over
the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own
silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called
for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons
have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their
concerns, this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are
you speaking about the war, Dr. King?” “Why are you joining
the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t
mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your
people?” they ask. And when I hear them, though I often understand
the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for
such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my
commitment, or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they
do not know the world in which they live. In the light of such tragic
misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly,
and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church—the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began
my pastorate—leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come
to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation.
This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation
Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt
to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a
collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt
to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue,
nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution
of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious
of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent
testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful
give and take on both sides. Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with
Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellow Americans.
Since
I am a preacher by calling, I suppose it is not surprising that I have
seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral
vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection
between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging
in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle.
It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both
black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments,
hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched
this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political
plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would
never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its
poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills
and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly
compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as
such.
Perhaps
a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear
to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of
the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their
husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative
to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who
had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles
away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found
in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced
with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens
as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat
them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity
burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly
live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face
of such cruel manipulation of the poor.
My
third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows
out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three
years, especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the
desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov
cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to
offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that
social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But
they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked
if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve
its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions
hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against
the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken
clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my
own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government,
for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence,
I cannot be silent.
For
those who ask the question, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?”
and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this
further answer. In 1957, when a group of us formed the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: “To save the soul
of America.” We were convinced that we could not limit our vision
to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction
that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants
of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear.
In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem,
who had written earlier:
O,
yes, I say it plain,
America
never was America to me,
And
yet I swear this oath—
America
will be!
Now,
it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for
the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war.
If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy
must read “Vietnam.” It can never be saved so long as it destroys
the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who
are yet determined that “America will be” are led down the
path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.
As
if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America
were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me
in 1964. And I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission,
a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood
of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.
But
even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning
of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship
of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes
marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could
it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men—for
communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and
for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that
my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved His enemies so fully
that He died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro
or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with
death or must I not share with them my life?
Finally,
as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from
Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid
if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with
all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling
of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood.
Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for
His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak
for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of
us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader
and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined
goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless,
for the victims of our nation, for those it calls “enemy,”
for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our
brothers.
And
as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways
to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to
the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each
side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta
in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse
of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too,
because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution
there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken
cries.
They
must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed
their own independence in 1954, in 1945 rather, after a combined French
and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China.
They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration
of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize
them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her
former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were
not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western
arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long.
With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking
self-determination and a government that had been established not by
China—for whom the Vietnamese have no great love—but by clearly
indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this
new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs
in their lives.
For
nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right
of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in
their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war
we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before
the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of
their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge
financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they
had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of
this tragic attempt at recolonization.
After
the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform
would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came
the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily
divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of
the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The
peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition,
supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss
reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all of this was
presided over by United States influence and then by increasing numbers
of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem’s
methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy,
but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change,
especially in terms of their need for land and peace.
The
only change came from America as we increased our troop commitments
in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and
without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets
and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform.
Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow
Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we
herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where
minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or
be destroyed by our bombs.
So
they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we
poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They
must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy
the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty
casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury.
So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander
into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without
clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the
children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the
children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their
mothers.
What
do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as
we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform?
What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as
the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration
camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim
to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?
We
have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and
the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated
in the crushing of the nation’s only non-communist revolutionary
political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the
enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and
children and killed their men.
Now
there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid
physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and
in the concrete of the concentration camps we call “fortified hamlets.”
The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on
such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must
speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too,
are our brothers.
Perhaps
a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who
have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation
Front, that strangely anonymous group we call “VC” or “communists”?
What must they think of the United States of America when they realize
that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to
bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they
think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up
of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of
“aggression from the North” as if there were nothing more
essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them
with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with
violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely
we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions.
Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence.
Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply
dwarf their greatest acts.
How
do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less
than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the
blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are
aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear
ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political
parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak
of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by
the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of
new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in
real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and
they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be
excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation
planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon
the power of a new violence?
Here
is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it
helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions,
to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed
see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature,
we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who
are called the opposition.
So,
too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land,
and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable
mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in
Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions
now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against
the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French
Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness
of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against
French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give
up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel
as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954, they watched us conspire
with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi
Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been
betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these
things must be remembered.
Also
it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of
American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial
military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops, and
they remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers
and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into
the tens of thousands.
Hanoi
remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier
North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that
none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched
as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has
surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for
an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining
we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps
only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the
most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops
thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or
rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.
At
this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last
few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand
the arguments of those who are called “enemy,” I am as deeply
concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs
to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the
brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other
and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death,
for they must know after a short period there that none of the things
we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must
know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese,
and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of
the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.
Somehow
this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God
and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose
land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture
is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the
double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.
I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast
at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the
leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours;
the initiative to stop it must be ours.
This
is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one
of them wrote these words, and I quote:
Each
day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the
Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct.
The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their
enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so
carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize
that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and
political defeat. The image of America will never again be the
image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of
violence and militarism.
If
we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the
world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not
stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will
be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible,
clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands
a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands
that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure
in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese
people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply
from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in
Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic
war.
I would
like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately
to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from
this nightmarish conflict:
Number
one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.
Number
two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will
create the atmosphere for negotiation.
Three:
Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia
by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference
in Laos.
Four:
Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has
substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in
any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.
Five:
Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance
with the 1954 Geneva Agreement. [Sustained applause]
Part
of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant
asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which
included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we
can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that
is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. [Applause]
Meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task
while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful
commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our
nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared
to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of
protest possible.
As
we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for
them our nation’s role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative
of conscientious objection. [Sustained applause] I am pleased
to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students
at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who
find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. [Applause]
Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their
ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. [Sustained
applause] These are the times for real choices and not false ones.
We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our
nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions
must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must
all protest.
Now
there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending
us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against
the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to
go on now to say something even more disturbing.
The
war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American
spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality, [Applause] and
if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing
“clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation.
They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned
about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique
and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names
and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and
profound change in American life and policy. [Sustained applause]
So such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling
as sons of the living God.
In
1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to
him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During
the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which
has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela.
This need to maintain social stability for our investment accounts for
the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It
tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in
Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already
been active against rebels in Peru.
It
is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy
come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make
peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
[Sustained applause] Increasingly, by choice or by accident,
this is the role our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful
revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the
pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world
revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.
We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift
from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines
and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more
important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism,
and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
A true
revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and
justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we
are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that
will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole
Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly
beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to
see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. [Applause]
A true
revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast
of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across
the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums
of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits
out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and
say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with
the landed gentry of South America and say: “This is not just.”
The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others
and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true
revolution of values will lay 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, of filling our nation’s homes
with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the
veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and
bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged,
cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues
year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs
of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. [Sustained applause]
America,
the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the
way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death
wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit
of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing
to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands
until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
This
kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism.
[Applause] War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated
by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those
who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United
States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These
are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must
not engage in a negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust
for democracy, [Applause] realizing that our greatest defense
against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice.
We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty,
insecurity, and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed
of communism grows and develops.
These
are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against
old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of
a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The
shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before.
The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West
must support these revolutions.
It
is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of
communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations
that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world
have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many
to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism
is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and follow
through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies
in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into
a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism,
and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge
the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every
valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low;
[Audience:] (Yes) the crooked shall be made straight,
and the rough places plain.”
A genuine
revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties
must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now
develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve
the best in their individual societies.
This
call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond
one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an
all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood,
this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches
of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute
necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking
of some sentimental and weak response. I’m not speaking of that
force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which
all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle
of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to
ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief
about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle
of Saint John: “Let us love one another, (Yes) for love
is God. (Yes) And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth
God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love.” “If
we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in
us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the
day.
We
can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar
of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising
tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and
individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold
Toynbee says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving
choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil.
Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love
is going to have the last word.”
We
are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We
are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum
of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination
is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked,
and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men
does not remain at flood—it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for
time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and
rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous
civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.”
There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance
or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes,
and having writ moves on.”
We
still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent 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. If we do not act, we shall surely be
dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved
for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality,
and strength without sight.
Now
let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter,
but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the
sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we
say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard?
Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against
their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will
there be another message—of longing, of hope, of solidarity with
their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The
choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose
in this crucial moment of human history.
As
that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:
Once
to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,In
the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;Some
great cause, God’s new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,
And
the choice goes by forever ’twixt that darkness and that light.
Though
the cause of evil prosper, yet ’tis truth alone is strongThough
her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrongYet
that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknownStandeth
God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
And
if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform
this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will
make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords
of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but
make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over
America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters,
and righteousness like a mighty stream. [Sustained applause]
