In 1963, the Korean War had been over for a decade and World War II nearly twice that.  In September of that year, four black girls had been killed by a bomb planted outside a church in Birmingham as white extremists continued to oppose equality for blacks. Police used violence to disrupt civil rights demonstrations.  As Minister of Faith for the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X spoke throughout the cities and universities of the North.   

Excerpts from “Message to the Grass Roots,” speech by Malcolm X in Detroit, November 10, 1963

As long as the white man sent you to Korea, you bled. He sent you to Germany, you bled. He sent you to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese, you bled. You bleed for white people, but when it comes to seeing your own churches being bombed and little black girls murdered, you haven’t got any blood. You bleed when the white man says bleed; you bite when the white man says bite; and you bark when the white man says bark. I hate to say this about us, but it’s true. How are you going to be nonviolent in Mississippi, as violent as you were in Korea? How can you justify being nonviolent in Mississippi and Alabama, when your churches are being bombed, and your little girls are being murdered, and at the same time you are going to get violent with Hitler, and Tojo, and somebody else you don’t even know?

If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country…. 

So I cite these various revolutions [American, French, Russian, and Chinese], brothers and sisters, to show you that you don’t have a peaceful revolution. You don’t have a turn-the-other-cheek revolution. There’s no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. The only kind of revolution that is nonviolent is the Negro revolution. The only revolution in which the goal is loving your enemy is the Negro revolution. It is the only revolution in which the goal is a desegregated lunch counter, a desegregated theater, a desegregated park, and a desegregated public toilet; you can sit down next to white folks---on the toilet. That’s no revolution. Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality….  

Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, “I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.” No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Rev. Cleage was pointing out beautifully, singing “We Shall Overcome?” You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing, you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. These Negroes aren’t asking for any nation—they’re trying to crawl back on the plantation.

When you want a nation, that’s called nationalism…. If you’re afraid of black nationalism, you’re afraid of revolution. And if you love black revolution, you love black nationalism….  

There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent. Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery. That’s a good religion. 

Source: Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1989.  7-10, 12.

Document 5.21.1

Document 5.21.5: “What We Want” by Stokely Carmichael

Carmichael was chairman of SNCC when he coined the term “Black Power.”  As chairman, he appeared at many universities to recruit members or spread his ideas.

One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to now there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghetto. There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites. It served as a sort of buffer zone between them and angry young blacks. None of its so-called leaders could go into a rioting community and be listened to. In a sense, I blame ourselves---together with the mass media---for what has happened in Watts, Harlem, Chicago, Cleveland, Omaha. Each time the people in those cities saw Martin Luther King get slapped, they became angry; when they saw four little black girls bombed to death, they were angrier; and when nothing happened, they were steaming. We had nothing to offer that they could see, except to go out and be beaten again. We helped to build the frustration.

________

An organization which claims to be working for the needs of the community---as SNCC does---must work to provide that community with a position of strength from which to make its voice heard. This is the significance of black power beyond the slogan. 

Black power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America to their questions about it. We should begin with the basic fact that black Americans have two basic problems: they are poor and they are black. All other problems arise from this two-sided reality: lack of education, the so-called apathy of black men. Any program to end racism must address itself to that double reality. 

________

The concept of “black power” is not a recent or isolated phenomenon: It has grown out of the ferment of agitation and activity by different people and organizations in many black communities over the years. Our last year of work in Alabama added a new concrete possibility. In Lowndes County, black power will mean that if a Negro is elected sheriff, he can end police brutality. If a black man is elected tax assessor, he can collect and channel funds for the building of better roads and schools serving black people---thus advancing the move from political power into the economic arena. In such areas as Lowndes, where black men have a majority, they will attempt to use it to exercise control. This is what they seek: control. Where Negroes lack a majority, black power means proper representation and sharing of control. It means the creation of power bases from which black people can work to change statewide or nationwide patterns of oppression through pressure from strength---instead of weakness. Politically, black power means what it has always meant to SNCC: the coming together of black people to elect representatives and to force those representatives to speak to their needs. It does not mean merely putting black faces into office. A man or woman who is black and from the slums cannot be automatically expected to speak to the needs of black people. Most of the black politicians we see around the country today are not what SNCC means by black power. The power must be that of a community, and emanate from there. 

________

Ultimately, the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives. The colonies of the United States---and this includes the black ghettoes within its borders, north and south---must be liberated. For a century this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has been the same---a powerful few have maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses. This pattern must be broken. As its grip loosens here and there around the world, the hopes of black Americans become more realistic. For racism to die, a totally different America must be born.

________

White America will not face the problem of color, the reality of it. The well-intended say: “We’re all human, everybody is really decent, we must forget color.” But color cannot be “forgotten” until its weight is recognized and dealt with. White America will not acknowledge the ways in which this country sees itself are contradicted by being black---and always have been. Whereas most of the people who settled this country came here for freedom or for economic opportunity, blacks were brought here to be slaves. When the Lowndes County Freedom Organization chose the black panther as its symbol, it was christened by the press as the “Black Panther Party”---but the Alabama Democratic Party, whose symbol is a rooster, has never been called the White Cock Party. No one ever talked about “white power” because power in this country is white. All this adds up to more than merely identifying a group phenomenon by some catchy name or adjective. The furor over that black panther reveals the problems that white America has with color and sex; the furor over “black power” reveals how deep racism runs and the great fear which is attached to it.

________

I have said that most white liberals react to “black power” with the question, What about me?, rather than saying: Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll see if I can do it. There are answers to the right question. One of the most disturbing things about almost all white supporters of the movement has been that they are afraid to go into their own communities – which is where the racism exists---and work to get rid of it. They want to run from Berkeley to tell us what to do in Mississippi; let them look instead at Berkeley. They admonish blacks to be nonviolent; let them preach nonviolence in the white community. They come to teach me Negro history; let them go to the suburbs and open up freedom schools for whites. Let them work to stop America’s racist foreign policy; let them press this government to cease supporting the economy of South Africa.

There is a vital job to be done among poor whites. We hope to see eventually a coalition between poor blacks and poor whites. That is the only coalition which seems acceptable to us, and we see such a coalition as the major internal instrument of change in American society. SNCC has tried several times to organize poor whites; we are trying to again now, with an initial training program in Tennessee. It is purely academic today to talk about bringing poor blacks and whites together, but the job of creating a poor-white power bloc must be attempted. The main responsibility for it falls upon the whites.

________

But our mission is not merely of a society where all black men have enough to buy the good things of life. When we urge that black money go into black pockets, we mean the communal pocket. We want to see money go back into the community and used to benefit it. We want to see the cooperative concept applied in business and banking. We want to see black ghetto residents demand that an exploiting store keeper sell them, at minimal cost, a building or a shop that they will own and improve cooperatively; they can back their demand with a rent strike, or a boycott, and a community so unified behind them that no one else will move into the building or buy at the store. The society we seek to build among black people, then, is not a capitalist one. It is a society in which the spirit of community and humanistic love prevail.

Source: From “What We Want,” by Stokely Carmichael in The New York Review of Books (September 22, 1966). Copyright 1966 NYREV, Inc. From The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1965-1990. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Copyright Blackside, Inc. 1991. 

Document #5

“Black Power: A Voice Within”

Ruth Turner Perot, special asst. to national director of CORE

1967

…Black power to CORE means the organization of the black community into a tight and disciplined group, for six purposes:

1. Growth of political power.
2. Building economic power.
3. Improvement of self-image.
4. Development of Negro leadership.
5. Demanding federal law enforcement.
6. Mobilization of Negro consumer power.

Let me give some examples of how CORE programs the concept:

• In Baltimore, MFU, an independent union organized by CORE, raised wages of nearly 100 members, workers regular labor unions did not want to organize, from $0.35 to $1.50.
• Baltimore, CORE’S 1966 Target City, also demonstrated black power in the November elections. As a result of intensive mobilizing and organizing by CORE and other groups, Negroes switched 35 to 1 to vote for Republican [Spiro] Agnew over “Home is your castle” [George P.] Mahoney. Mahoney was defeated. We were so effective, in fact, that the Ku Klux Klan has chosen Baltimore as [its] Target City.
• CORE ran eight Negro candidates for school board elections in Democratic primaries in Louisiana. All won, first time since Reconstruction.
• Also---Louisiana (Opelousas)---Sweet potato cooperative. 375 farmers, 15 white, growing their sweet potato crops. This is economic black power. 
• Watts, Operation Bootstraps, “Learn, Baby, Learn.” 12 teenagers, graduates of [a] computer course, have set up their own business, offering up-to-date skills for pay.
• Freedom School in Baltimore and plans for Black Arts and Afro-American Institute. A place where black people can learn of history and contributions to world culture and civilization. Power of self-knowledge. Also in Baltimore, a leadership training [program] for neighborhood people.
• As a result of CORE insistence, federal examiners sent to South Carolina and Mississippi counties. Result: registration climbed.

We believe that these building blocks will become a bulwark that will protect the next Adam Clayton Powell, multiplied many times over. There is no other choice. If power for the powerless is not achieved so that changes within its structure can be made, this nation will not survive. 

Document 5*: “Black Power: A Voice Within.” From “Black Power: A Voice Within,” by Ruth Turner Perot in Oberlin Alumni Magazine LXIII (May 1967). From The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1965-1990. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Copyright Blackside, Inc. 1991.

Gerda Lerner, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, interviewed Ella Baker while researching her book Black Women in White America, published in 1972 (Pantheon Books: New York, pages 346-52.)  The following text is an excerpt from the transcript of that interview with Baker. 

In my organizational work, I have never thought in terms of my “making a contribution.”  I just thought of myself as functioning where there was a need.  And if I have made a contribution I think it may be that I had some influence on a large number of people.

As assistant field secretary of the branches of the NAACP, much of my work was in the South.  At that time [1940s] the NAACP was the leader on the cutting edge of social change.  I remember when NAACP membership in the South was the basis for getting beaten up or even killed.  

I used to leave New York about the 15^th of February and travel through the South for four to five months.  I would go to, say, Birmingham, Alabama and help organize membership campaigns.  And in the process of helping to organize membership campaigns, there was the opportunity for developing community reactions.  You would go into areas where people were not yet organized in the NAACP and try to get them more involved.  Maybe you would start with some simple thing like the fact that they had no street lights, or the fact that in the given area somebody had been arrested or had been jailed in a manner that was considered illegal and unfair, and the like.  You would deal with whatever the local problem was, and on the basis of the needs of the people you would try to organize them in the NAACP. . .

My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice.  If they had only ten members in the NAACP at a given point, those ten members could be in touch with twenty-five members in the next little town, with fifty in the next and throughout the state as a result of the organization of state conferences, and they, of course, could be linked up with the national.  People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves. . . .

[Baker left the NAACP but continued to volunteer with the organization throughout the fifties in New York City while working as an activist within the community.  After the 1954 Supreme Court order to desegregate schools, Baker was selected for the Mayor’s Commission on School Integration.]

I’ve never believed that people who control things really were willing and able to pay the price of integration.  From a practical standpoint, anyone who looked at the Harlem area knew that the potential for integration per se was basically impossible unless there were some radically innovative things done.  And those innovative things would not be acceptable to those who ran the school system, nor to communities, nor even to the people who call themselves supporters of integration.  I did a good deal of speaking, and I went to Queens, I went to the upper West side, and the people very eagerly said they wanted school integration.  But when you raised the question of whether they would permit or would welcome Blacks to live in the same houses with them, which was the only practical way at that stage to achieve integration, they squirmed.  Integration certainly had to be pushed concurrently with changing the quality of education that the black children were getting, and changing the attitudes of the educational establishment toward the black community.

I don’t think we achieved too much with the committee except to pinpoint certain issues and to have survived some very sharp confrontations with the Superintendent and others on the Board of Education.  But out of it came increased fervor on the part of the black communities to make some changes.  One of the gratifying things to me is the fact that even as late as this year I have met people who were in that group and who have been continuously active in the struggle for quality education in the black communities ever since.

There certainly has been progress in the direction of the capacity of people to face this issue.  And to me, when people themselves know what they are looking for and recognize that they can exercise some influence by action, that’s progress.

Come 1957, I went down South a couple of times in connection with the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference….  I stayed with the SCLC for two and a half years, because they didn’t have anybody.  My official capacity was varied.  When I first went down [to set up the Atlanta office], I didn’t insist on a title, which is nothing new or unusual for me; it didn’t bother me.  I was just there in person.  And then they were looking for a minister, a man, and I helped to find a minister and a man, and he stayed a while, and when he came I decided that since I was doing what I was doing, he was the director and I became, I think, co-director.  And then there was nobody, and of course there was no money in those days, so I kept on until the summer of 1960.  And prior to that, of course, the sit-ins had started, and I was able to get the SCLC to at least sponsor the conference in Raleigh.  We had hoped to call together about 100 or 125 of the young leaders who had emerged in the sit-ins in the South.  But of course the sit-ins had been so dynamic in the field that when we got to the meeting we had two hundred and some people, including some from the North.  And out of that conference of the Easter weekend of 1960, which I coordinated and organized, we had a committee that came out of it, and out of that committee SNCC was born.

And after SNCC came into existence, of course, it opened up a new era of struggle.  I felt the urge to stay close by.  Because if I had done anything anywhere, it had been largely in the role of supporting things, and in the background of things that needed to be done for the organizations that were supposedly out front.  So I felt it I had done it for the elders, I could do it for the young people. . . .

[Baker’s relationship to SNCC was purely voluntary, so she supported herself by taking a variety of positions with community organizations in Atlanta before moving back to New York after the 1964 elections.]

There are those, some of the young people especially, who have said to me that if I had not been a woman I would have been well known in certain places, and perhaps held certain kinds of positions.

I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed peoples to depend so largely upon a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight.  It usually means he has been touted through the public media, which means that the media made him and the media may undo him.  There is also the danger in our culture that, because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement.  Such people get so involved with playing the game of being important that they exhaust themselves and their time, and they don’t do the work of actually organizing people.  

For myself, circumstances frequently dictated what had to be done as I saw it.  For example, I had no plans to go down and set up the office of SCLC.  But it seemed unless something were done whatever impetus had been gained would be lost, and nobody else was available who was willing or able to do it.  So I went because to me it was more important what was a potential for all of us than it was to do what I might have done for myself.  I knew from the beginning that as a woman, an older woman, in a group of ministers who are accustomed to having women largely as supporters, there was no place for me to have come into a leadership role.  The competition wasn’t worth it.

The movement of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s was carried largely by women, since it came out of church support groups.  It was sort of second nature to women to play a supportive role.  How many made a conscious decision on the basis of the larger goals, how many on the basis of habit pattern, I don’t know.  But it’s true that the numbers of women who carried the movement is much larger than that of men.  Black women have had to carry this role, and I think the younger women are insisting on equal footing.

I don’t advocate anybody following the pattern I followed, unless they find themselves in a situation where they think that the larger goals will be shortchanged if they don’t.  From the standpoint of the historical pattern of society, which seems to assume that this is the best role for women, I think that certainly the young people who are challenging this ought to be challenging it, and it ought to be changed.  But I also think you have to have a certain sense of your own value, and a sense of security on your part, to be able to forgo the glamor of what the leadership role offers.  From the standpoint of my work and my own self-concepts, I don’t think I have thought of myself largely as a woman.  I thought of myself as an individual with a certain amount of sense of the need to participate in the movement.  I have always thought what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people.  Every time I see a young person who has come through the system to a stage where he could profit from the system and identify with it, but who identifies more with the struggle of black people who have not had his chance, every time I find such a person I take a new hope.  I feel a new life as a result of it.

Source: Jonathan Birnbaum and Clarence Taylor, ed., Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle. New York: New York University Press, 2000, pp. 467-71. Document 5.21.9

Dr. King delivered what was considered his most controversial speech on the Vietnam War at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned in New York City.  He spoke on April 4, exactly one year before he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

Excerpts from “The Importance of Vietnam,” by Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967.

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.  There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America.  A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle.  It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor---both black and white—through the poverty program.  There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings.  Then came the buildup of Vietnam and I watched the 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 attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home.  It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.  We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.  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 never live on the same block in Detroit.  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 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 Amercia would never be free or saved from itself unless 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 bird 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 Prize for Peace was also a commission—a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before “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 delineate for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God.  Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions.  We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy. For no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers….

Protesting the War

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 if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam.  We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means 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 conscientious objection.  I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one.  Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors.  These are the times for real choices and not false ones.  We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly.  Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

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 the 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 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.  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 now has justified the presence of U.S. military “advisors” in Venezuela.  This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala.  It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.  It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us.  Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken—the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

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 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, 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 only be 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 is not haphazard and superficial.  It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.  A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.  With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.”  It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin 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 veins of people 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.

American, 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. . . .

Source: King Jr., Martin Luther.  I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World.  Ed. James Melvin Washington.  San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1986.

Document 5.21.7