Happy MLK Day

A Time to Break Silence

by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

This speech was given by Dr. King at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned
at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, one year before he

was killed. It is reprinted from I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that
Changed the World by Martin Luther King, edited by James M. Washington

(HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).



I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience
leaves me no other choice. I join with 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 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 perplexed as they often do in the
case of this

dreadful conflict we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by
uncertainty; but we must move on.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have
found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must
speak. We must

speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but
we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first
time in our nation's history

that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move
beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm
dissent based upon the

mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is
rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well 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 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 misunderstandings, 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 can play in a successful resolution of the problem.
While they both may

have justifiable reason 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 NLF, but rather to
my fellow Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in
ending a conflict that

has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

IMPORTANCE OF VIETNAM

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 in 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 to

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 ghettoes 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 America 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 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 Prize for Peace 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 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.

STRANGE LIBERATORS

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to
understand and respond to compassion my mind goes constantly to the people
of that

peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, 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 1945 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

the 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 agreements. 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 routed out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords
and refused even to

discuss reunification with the north. The peasants watched as all this was
presided over by U.S. influence and then by increasing numbers of U.S.
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
dictatorships 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 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 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 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. What liberators?

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 the 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
us in 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 have no 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 with
the power of 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 would 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 agreements concerning foreign troops, and they remind
us that they did not

begin to send in any large number of supplies or men 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 of 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 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 on Vietnam and to understand
the arguments of those

who are called enemy, I am as deeply concerned about our 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 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 an American to the leaders of my 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: Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in
the heart

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. It will become clear
that our minimal

expectation is to occupy it as an American colony and men will not refrain
from thinking that our maximum hope is to goad China into a war so that we
may bomb her

nuclear installations. 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

horribly 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:

1.End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

2.Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create
the atmosphere for negotiation.

3.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 in any future Vietnam government.

5.Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in
accordance with the 1954 Geneva agreement.

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 most provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making
it available

in this country if necessary.

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 of
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 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
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.

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. 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 call everyone a Communist or an appeaser who advocates the seating of
Red

China in the United Nations and who recognizes that hate and hysteria are
not the final answers to the problem of these turbulent days. We must not
engage in a

negative anti-communism, but rather in a positive thrust 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 thosse conditions of
poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the
seed of communism

grows and develops.

THE PEOPLE ARE IMPORTANT

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against
old systems of exploitation and oppression and out of the wombs 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 the revolutionary spirit. Therefore,
communism is a judgement against our failure to make democracy real and
follow through on the

revolutions 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 moutain and hill shall be made low, and 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 world-wide 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 men. This oft misunderstood and 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 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; for love is God and everyone 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 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 the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for
time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on.
Over the bleached

bones and jumbled residue 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. "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 callling 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 the moment to decide,

In the strife of truth and falsehood,

For the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah,

Off'ring each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by forever

Twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper,

Yet 'tis truth alone is strong;

Though her portion be the scaffold,

And upon the throne be wrong:

Yet that scaffold sways the future,

And behind the dim unknown,

Standeth God within the shadow

Keeping watch above his own.