Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution
I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here this
morning, to have the opportunity of standing in this very great
and significant pulpit. And I do want to express my deep personal
appreciation to Dean Sayre and all of the cathedral clergy for extending
the invitation.
It is always a rich and rewarding experience to take a brief break
from our day-to-day demands and the struggle for freedom and human
dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned
friends of goodwill all over our nation. And certainly it is always
a deep and meaningful experience to be in a worship service. And
so for many reasons, Im happy to be here today.
I would like to use as a subject from which to preach this morning:
"Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution." The text
for the morning is found in the book of Revelation. There are two
passages there that I would like to quote, in the sixteenth chapter
of that book: "Behold I make all things new; former things
are passed away."
I am sure that most of you have read that arresting little story
from the pen of Washington Irving entitled "Rip Van Winkle."
The one thing that we usually remember about the story is that Rip
Van Winkle slept twenty years. But there is another point in that
little story that is almost completely overlooked. It was the sign
in the end, from which Rip went up in the mountain for his long
sleep.
When Rip Van Winkle went up into the mountain, the sign had a picture
of King George the Third of England. When he came down twenty years
later the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president
of the United States. When Rip Van Winkle looked up at the picture
of George Washingtonand looking at the picture he was amazedhe
was completely lost. He knew not who he was.
And this reveals to us that the most striking thing about the story
of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that Rip slept twenty years, but
that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring
up in the mountain a revolution was taking place that at points
would change the course of historyand Rip knew nothing about
it. He was asleep. Yes, he slept through a revolution. And
one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people
find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and
yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses,
that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.
There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution
is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution:
that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation
and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the
emergence of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is
a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking
place all over the world. Yes, we do live in a period where changes
are taking place. And there is still the voice crying through the
vista of time saying, "Behold, I make all things new; former
things are passed away."
Now whenever anything new comes into history it brings with it
new challenges and new opportunities. And I would like to deal with
the challenges that we face today as a result of this triple revolution
that is taking place in the world today.
First, we are challenged to develop a world perspective. No individual
can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that
he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in
which we live is geographically one. The challenge that we face
today is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.
Now it is true that the geographical oneness of this age has come
into being to a large extent through modern mans scientific
ingenuity. Modern man through his scientific genius has been able
to dwarf distance and place time in chains. And our jet planes have
compressed into minutes distances that once took weeks and even
months. All of this tells us that our world is a neighborhood.
Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of
this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment
to make of it a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have
got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or
we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the
single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.
And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some
strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what
you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until
I am what I ought to be. This is the way Gods universe is
made; this is the way it is structured.
John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms:
"No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece
of the continent, a part of the main." And he goes on toward
the end to say, "Any mans death diminishes me because
I am involved in mankind; therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." We must see this, believe
this, and live by it if we are to remain awake through a great revolution.
Secondly, we are challenged to eradicate the last vestiges of racial
injustice from our nation. I must say this morning that racial injustice
is still the black mans burden and the white mans shame.
It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast
majority of white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and
denied, subtle and sometimes not so subtlethe disease of racism
permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing
more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentinglyto
get rid of the disease of racism.
Something positive must be done. Everyone must share in the guilt
as individuals and as institutions. The government must certainly
share the guilt; individuals must share the guilt; even the church
must share the guilt.
We must face the sad fact that at eleven oclock on Sunday
morning when we stand to sing "In Christ there is no East or
West," we stand in the most segregated hour of America.
The hour has come for everybody, for all institutions of the public
sector and the private sector to work to get rid of racism. And
now if we are to do it we must honestly admit certain things and
get rid of certain myths that have constantly been disseminated
all over our nation.
One is the myth of time. It is the notion that only time can solve
the problem of racial injustice. And there are those who often sincerely
say to the Negro and his allies in the white community, "Why
dont you slow up? Stop pushing things so fast. Only time can
solve the problem. And if you will just be nice and patient and
continue to pray, in a hundred or two hundred years the problem
will work itself out."
There is an answer to that myth. It is that time is neutral. It
can be used wither constructively or destructively. And I am sorry
to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces
of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nationthe
people on the wrong sidehave used time much more effectively
than the forces of goodwill. And it may well be that we will have
to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words
and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling
silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say,
"Wait on time."
Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in
on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts
and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing
to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself
becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. So
we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do
right.
Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind
of over reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who
still feel that if the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro
is to rise out of the slum conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination
and segregation, he must do it all by himself. And so they say the
Negro must lift himself by his own bootstraps.
They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been
a slave on American soil. The people who say this never stop to
realize that the nation made the black mans color a stigma.
But beyond this they never stop to realize the debt that they owe
a people who were kept in slavery two hundred and forty-four years.
In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the
Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he
was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something
like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly
discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which
he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, "Now you
are free," but you dont give him any bus fare to get
to town. You dont give him any money to get some clothes to
put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.
Every court of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet
this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It
simply said, "Youre free," and it left him there
penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of
it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything
for the black man, though an act of Congress was giving away millions
of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it
was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an
economic floor.
But not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges
to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents
to further their expertise in farming; not only that, as the years
unfolded it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize
their farms. And to this day thousands of these very persons are
receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every years not
to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes
that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. Its
all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but
it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift
himself by his own bootstraps.
We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our
country, and there must be something positive and massive in order
to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial
injustice.
There is another thing closely related to racism that I would like
to mention as another challenge. We are challenged to rid our nation
and the world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads
its nagging, prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all
over our world. Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed
hungry tonight. They are ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they
are shabbily clad. Ive seen it in Latin America; Ive
seen it in Africa; Ive seen this poverty in Asia.
I remember some years ago Mrs. King and I journeyed to that great
country known as India. And I never will forget the experience.
It was a marvelous experience to meet and talk with the great leaders
of India, to meet and talk with and to speak to thousands and thousands
of people all over that vast country. These experiences will remain
dear to me as long as the cords of memory shall lengthen.
But I say to you this morning, my friends, there were those depressing
moments. How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his
own eyes evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at
night? How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own
eyes Gods children sleeping on the sidewalks at night? In
Bombay more than a million people sleep on the sidewalks every night.
In Calcutta more than six hundred thousand sleep on the sidewalks
every night. They have no beds to sleep in; they have no houses
to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that
out of Indias population of more than five hundred million
people, some four hundred and eighty million make an annual income
of less than ninety dollars a year. And most of them have never
seen a doctor or a dentist.
As I noticed these things, something within me cried out, "Can
we in America stand idly by and not be concerned?" And an answer
came: "Oh no!" Because the destiny of the United States
is tied up with the destiny of India and every other nation. And
I started thinking of the fact that we spend in America millions
of dollars a day to store surplus food, and I said to myself, "I
know where we can store that food free of chargein the wrinkled
stomachs of millions of Gods children all over the world who
go to bed hungry at night." And maybe we spend far too much
of our national budget establishing military bases around the world
rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding.
Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our
own nation there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken.
I have seen them here and there. I have seen them in the ghettos
of the North; I have seen them in the rural areas of the South;
I have seen them in Appalachia. I have just been in the process
of touring many areas of our country and I must confess that in
some situations I have literally found myself crying.
I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day, which is in Whitman
County, the poorest county in the United States. I tell you, I saw
hundreds of little black boys and black girls walking the streets
with no shoes to wear. I saw their mothers and fathers trying to
carry on a little Head Start program, but they had no money. The
federal government hadnt funded them, but they were trying
to carry on. They raised a little money here and there; trying to
get a little food to feed the children; trying to teach them a little
something.
And I saw mothers and fathers who said to me not only were they
unemployed, they didnt get any kind of incomeno old-age
pension, no welfare check, no anything. I said, "How do you
live?" And they say, "Well, we go around, go around to
the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the berry
season comes, we pick berries. When the rabbit season comes, we
hunt and catch a few rabbits. And thats about it."
And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into
the homes of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditionsno,
not with wall-to-wall carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches.
I stood in an apartment and this welfare mother said to me, "The
landlord will not repair this place. Ive been here two years
and he hasnt made a single repair." She pointed out the
walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes
where the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay
awake to keep the rats and roaches from getting to the children.
I said, "How much do you pay for this apartment?" She
said, "a hundred and twenty-five dollars." I looked, and
I thought, and said to myself, "It isnt worth sixty dollars."
Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions
day in and day out where the whole area is constantly drained without
being replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the
tragedy is, so often these forty million people are invisible because
America is so affluent, so rich. Because our expressways carry us
from the ghetto, we dont see the poor.
Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went
to hell because he didnt see the poor. His name was Dives.
He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who
was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were
all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move.
But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just
to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did
nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, "Dives went
to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives."
There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because
he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all
wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him,
and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing
individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis.
And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism,
you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven
and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between
heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.
Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament,
you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a
rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little
millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives
didnt go to hell because he was rich; Dives didnt realize
that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge
the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went
to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never
really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to
become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum
and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he
sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.
And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the worldand
nothings wrong with thatthis is Americas opportunity
to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The
question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about
poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the
resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we
have the will.
In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington to see if the
will is still alive or if it is alive in this nation. We are coming
to Washington in a Poor Peoples Campaign. Yes, we are going
to bring the tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We are going to
bring those who have known long years of hurt and neglect. We are
going to bring those who have come to feel that life is a long and
desolate corridor with no exit signs. We are going to bring children
and adults and old people, people who have never seen a doctor or
a dentist in their lives.
We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not
coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government
address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, "We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
But if a man doesnt have a job or an income, he has neither
life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness.
He merely exists.
We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory
note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic
nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise
and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.
Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience
that the nation doesnt move around questions of genuine equality
for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively,
dramatically in terms of direct action.
Great documents are here to tell us something should be done. We
met here some years ago in the White House conference on civil rights.
And we came out with the same recommendations that we will be demanding
in our campaign here, but nothing has been done. The Presidents
commission on technology, automation and economic progress recommended
these things some time ago. Nothing has been done. Even the urban
coalition of mayors of most of the cities of our country and the
leading businessmen have said these things should be done. Nothing
has been done. The Kerner Commission came out with its report just
a few days ago and then made specific recommendations. Nothing has
been done.
And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwill
put their bodies and their souls in motion. And it will be the kind
of soul force brought into being as a result of this confrontation
that I believe will make the difference.
Yes, it will be a Poor Peoples Campaign. This is the question
facing America. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation.
America has not met its obligations and its responsibilities to
the poor.
One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we
will talk in terms of things weve done. Yes, we will be able
to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic
buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate
oceanic depths. We brought into being many other things with our
scientific and technological power.
It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, "That
was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked,
and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to
live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you
cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least
of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me." Thats the question
facing America today.
I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we
must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels,
and there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that war
can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through
a great revolution. President Kennedy said on one occasion, "Mankind
must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind."
The world must hear this. I pray God that America will hear this
before it is too late, because today were fighting a war.
I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has
ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in
the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened
the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces
of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination
of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position
of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.
It has played havoc with our domestic destinies. This day we are
spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soldier.
Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars
while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person
characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program,
which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.
Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the
world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles
away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese
people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we
force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal
solidarity. Yet when they come back home that cant hardly
live on the same block together.
The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down
the line and see that something must be doneand something
must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations
so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There
is not a single major ally of the United States of America that
would dare send a troop to Vietnam, and so the only friends that
we have now are a few client-nations like Taiwan, Thailand, South
Korea, and a few others.
This is where we are. "Mankind must put an end to war or war
will put an end to mankind," and the best way to start is to
put an end to war in Vietnam, because if it continues, we will inevitably
come to the point of confronting China which could lead the whole
world to nuclear annihilation.
It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence.
It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to
disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear
tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby
disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into
the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed
into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.
This is why I felt the need of raising my voice against that war
and working wherever I can to arouse the conscience of our nation
on it. I remember so well when I first took a stand against the
war in Vietnam. The critics took me on and they had their say in
the most negative and sometimes most vicious way.
One day a newsman came to me and said, "Dr. King, dont
you think youre going to have to stop, now, opposing the war
and move more in line with the administrations policy? As
I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your organization, and
people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Dont
you feel that youve really got to change your position?"
I looked at him and I had to say, "Sir, Im sorry you
dont know me. Im not a consensus leader. I do not determine
what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference. Ive not taken a sort of Gallup
Poll of the majority opinion." Ultimately a genuine leader
is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.
On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient?
And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic?
Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question,
is it right?
There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither
safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience
tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for
all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience
and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "We aint
goin study war no more." This is the challenge facing
modern man.
Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the
struggle for justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic
of despair. Im going to maintain hope as we come to Washington
in this campaign. The cards are stacked against us. This time we
will really confront a Goliath. God grant that we will be that David
of truth set out against the Goliath of injustice, the Goliath of
neglect, the Goliath of refusing to deal with the problems, and
go on with the determination to make America the truly great America
that it is called to be.
I say to you that our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going
to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal
of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be as a
people, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America.
Before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before
Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words
of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. Before the beautiful
words of the "Star Spangled Banner" were written, we were
here.
For more than two centuries our forebearers labored here without
wages. They made cotton king, and they built the homes of their
masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions.
And yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to grow and
develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldnt
stop us, the opposition that we now face will surely fail.
Were going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage
of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied
in our echoing demands. And so, however dark it is, however deep
the angry feelings are, and however violent explosions are, I can
still sing "We Shall Overcome."
We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long,
but it bends toward justice.
We shall overcome because Carlyle is right"No lie can
live forever."
We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right"Truth,
crushed to earth, will rise again."
We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is rightas
we were singing earlier today,
Truth forever on the scaffold,
Wrong forever on the throne.
Yet that scaffold sways the future.
And behind the dim unknown stands God,
Within the shadow keeping watch above his own.
With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair
the stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform
the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of
brotherhood.
Thank God for John, who centuries ago out on a lonely, obscure
island called Patmos caught vision of a new Jerusalem descending
out of heaven from God, who heard a voice saying, "Behold,
I make all things new; former things are passed away."
God grant that we will be participants in this newness and this
magnificent development. If we will but do it, we will bring about
a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace. And that day the
morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout
for joy. God bless you.
Delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on 31
March 1968. Congressional Record, 9 April 1968.
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