The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential
Address

By Reverand Martin Luther King, Jr., 16 August 1967

...And one day we must ask the question, Why are there forty
million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that
question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a
broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin
to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that
more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole
society...

Martin Luther King on racism, poverty, capitalism,
and other big questions

This is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last presidential address to the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (1967). For those who have
tried to convert Dr. King into a harmless symbol while ignoring his
message,this is a most uncomfortable speech indeed, which is why you
never hear too much about it. It remains relevant today. I've
culled this from A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and
Speeches of Martin LutherKing, Jr., edited by James Melvin
Washington, where this speech is published under the title Where Do
We Go From Here? on pages 245-252. Any errors of transcription
are my own.

John Lacny

Martin Luther King, Jr., SCLC Presidential Address, 1967

Now, in order to answer the question, Where do we go from here?
which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now.
When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine
taxes and representation declared that the Negro was sixty percent of
a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare that he is
fifty percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has
approximately one half those of whites. of the bad things of life, he
has twice those of whites. Thus half of all Negroes live in
substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites.
When we view the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double
share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant
mortality among Negroes is double that of whites and there are twice
as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size
in the population.

In other spheres, the figures are equally alarming. In elementary
schools, Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their
segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than
the white schools. One-twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend
college. Of employed Negroes, seventy-five percent hold menial jobs.

This is where we are. Where do we go from here? First, we must
massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amidst a
systemthat still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic
sense of values. We must no longer be ashamed of being black. The
job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so
many centuries that they are nobody is not easy.

Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly
and degrading. In Roget's Thesaurus there are 120 synonyms for
blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, as for example,
blot, soot, grim, devil and foul. And there are some 134 synoyms for
whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity,
cleanliness, chastity and innocence. A white lie is better than a
black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is a black
sheep. Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language
should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach
the Negro child sixty ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate
his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore
himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority.

The tendency to ignore the Negro's contribution to American life
and to strip him of his personhood is as old as the earliest history
books and as contemporary as the morning's newspaper. To upset
this cultural homicide, the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of
his own Olympian manhood. Any movement for the Negro's freedom
that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. As long
as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological
freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon
against the long night of physical slavery. No Lincolnian
emancipation proclamation or Johnsonian civil rights bill can totally
bring this kind of freedom. The negro will only be free when he
reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the
pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation.
And, with a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must
boldly throw off the manacles of self-abegnation and say to himself
and to the world, I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with
dignity and honor. I have a rich and noble history. How painful and
exploited that history has been. Yes, I was a slave through my
foreparents and I am not ashamed of that. I'm ashamed of the
people who were so sinful to make me a slave. Yes, we must stand
up and say, I'm black and I'm beautiful, and this
self-affirmation is the black man's need, made compelling by the
white man's crimes against him.

Another basic challenge is to discover how to organize our strength in
terms of economic and political power. No one can deny that the Negro
is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power. Indeed, one of the
great problems that the Negro confronts is his lack of power. From
old plantations of the South to newer ghettoes of the North, the Negro
has been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness.
Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and
destiny he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes
whimsical decisions of this white power structure. The plantation and
ghetto were created by those who had power, both to confine those who
had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. The problem of
transforming the ghetto, therefore, is a problem of
power—confrontation of the forces of power demanding change and
the forces of power dedicated to the preserving of the status quo.
Now power properly understood is nothing but the ability to
achievepurpose. It is the strength required to bring about social,
political and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day.
He said, Power is the ability of a labor union like the UAW to make
the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say,
‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That's
power.

Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral
convictions and concerns, and so often have problems with power.
There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You
see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And
one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and
power have usually been constrasted as opposites—polar
opposites—so that love is identified with a resignation of
power, and power with a denial of love.

It was this misinterpretation that caused Nietzsche, who was a
philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of
love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian
theologians to reject the Nietzschean philosophy of the will to power
in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we've got to get
this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without
love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental
and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of
justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that
stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.
What has happened is that we have had it wrong and confused in our own
country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their
goals through power devoid of love and conscience.

This is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the
same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly
abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power
with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our
times.

We must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed
annual income. Now, early in this century this proposal would have
been greeted with ridicule and denunciation, as destructive of
initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was
considered the measure of the individual's ability and talents.
And, in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods
indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We've
come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the
blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that
dislocations in the market operations of our economy and the
prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them
in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. Today the
poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our consciences by being
branded as inferior or incompetent. We also know that no matter how
dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate
all poverty.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold. We must
create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made
consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this
position we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual
is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will
have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not
available. In 1879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs
when he wrote in Progress and Poverty:

The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind,
the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches
literature and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It
is not the work of slaves driven to their tasks either by the task, by
the taskmaster, or by animal necessity. It is the work of men who
somehow find a form of work that brings a security for its own sake
and a state of society where want is abolished.

Work of this sort could be enormously increased, and we are likely to
find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding
the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is
first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will doa great
deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes who have a double
disability will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have
the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.

Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes
inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity
of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life
are in his own hands, when he has the means to seek self-improvement.
Personal conflicts among husbands, wives and children will diminish
when the unjust measurement of human worth on the scale of dollars is
eliminated.

Now our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a
guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion
dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend
thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in
Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can
spend billions of dollars to put God's children on their own two
feet right here on earth.

Now, let me say briefly that we must reaffirm our commitment to
nonviolence. I want to stress this. The futility of violence in the
struggle for racial justice has been tragically etched in all the
recent Negro riots. Yesterday, I tried to analyze the riots and deal
with theircauses. Today I want to give the other side. There is
certainly something painfully sad about a riot. One sees screaming
youngsters and angry adults fighting hopelessly and aimlessly against
impossible odds. And deep down within them, you can see a desire for
self-destruction, a kind of suicidal longing.

Occasionally Negroes contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other
riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action.
But those who express this view always end up with stumbling words
when asked what concrete gains have been won as a result. At best,
the riots have produced a little additional antipoverty money allotted
by frightened government officials, and a few water-sprinklers to cool
the children of the ghettoes. It is something like improving the food
in prison while the people remain securely incarcerated behind bars.
Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the
organized protest demonstrations. When one tries to pin down
advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers
are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist
state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare.
They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in
overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had
already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces.
Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United
States. In a violent racial situation, the power structure has the
local police, the state troopers, the National Guard and, finally, the
army to call on—all of which are predominantly white.
Furthermore, few if any violent revolutions have been successful
unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the
nonresistant majority. Castro may have had only a few Cubans actually
fighting with him up in the hills, but he could never have overthrown
the Batista regime unless he had the sympathy of the vast majority of
Cuban people.

It is perfectly clear that a violent revolution on the part of
American blacks would find no sympathy and support from the white
population and very little from the majority of Negroes themselves.
This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates
about freedom. This is a time for action. What is needed is a
strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into
the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this
has only been offered by the nonviolent movement. Without recognizing
this we will end up with solutions that don't solve, answers that
don't answer and explanations that don't explain.

And so I say to you today that I still stand by nonviolence. And I am
still convinced that it is the most potent weapon available to the
Negro in his struggle for justice in this country. And the other
thing is that I am concerned about a better world. I'm concerned
about justice. I'm concerned about brotherhood. I'm
concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about these, he can
never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a
murderer but you can't murder murder. Through violence you may
murder a liar but you can't establish truth. Through violence you
may murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. Darkness cannot
put out darkness. Only light can do that.

And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love. For I know
that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind's problems.
And I'm going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it
isn't popular to talk about it in some circles today. I'm not
talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I'm talking
about a strong, demanding love. And I have seen too much hate.
I've seen to much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South.
I've seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many
White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate myself, because
every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and
their personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great a
burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the
highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful
thing is that we are moving against wrong when we do it, because John
was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who
has love has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate
reality.

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about
Where do we go from here, that we honestly face the fact that
the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the
whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here.
And one day we must ask the question, Why are there forty million
poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question,
you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader
distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to
question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that
more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole
society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in
life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an
edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that
questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with
this, you begin to ask the question, Who owns the oil? You
begin to ask the question, Who owns the iron ore? You begin to
ask the question, Why is it that people have to pay water bills in
a world that is two-thirds water? These are questions that must be
asked.

Now, don't think that you have me in a bind today. I'm
not talkingabout communism.

What I'm saying to you this morning is that communism forgets that
life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the
kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor
the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found
in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I
say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that
the problem of racism, the problem of exploitation, and the problem of
war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are
interrelated.

If you will let me be a preacher just a little bit—One night, a
juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be
saved. Jesus didn't get bogged down in the kind of isolated
approach of what he shouldn't do. Jesus didn't say, Now
Nicodemus, you must stop lying. He didn't say, Nicodemus,
you must stop cheating if you are doing that. He didn't say,
Nicodemus, you must not commit adultery. He didn't say,
Nicodemus, now you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that
excessively. He said something altogether different, because Jesus
realized something basic—that if a man will lie, he will steal.
And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting
bogged down in one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, Nicodemus,
you must be born again.

He said, in other words, Your whole structure must be changed.
A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will
thingify them—make them things. Therefore they will
exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation
that will exploit economically will have foreign investments and
everything else, and will ahve to use its military to protect them.
All of these problems are tied together.

What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and
say, America, you must be born again!

So, I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go
out with a divine dissatisfaction. Let us be dissatisfied until
America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an
anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that
separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of
poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the
forces of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on
the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily
security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk
heaps of history, and every family is living in adecent sanitary home.
Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools
will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality,integrated
education. Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a
problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of
diversity. Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black
they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their
character and not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be
dissatisfied.

Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who
will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his
God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will
roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us
be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie
down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree
and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied. And men will
recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the
face of the earth. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody
will shout White Power! -- when nobody will shout Black
Power!—but everybody will talk about God's power and
human power.

I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be
smooth. There will be still rocky places of frustration and meandering
points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and
there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be
transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be
shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with
tear-drenched eyes have to stand before the bier of some courageous
civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly
acts of bloodthirsty mobs. Difficult and painful as it is, we must
walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. And
as we continue our chartered course, we may gain consolation in the
words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a great
freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died.

Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place
For which our fathers sighed?

We have come over the way
That with tears hath been watered.
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage
to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet
new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of
freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of
despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights,
let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe,
working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is
able to make a way out of now way and transform dark yesterdays into
bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is
long but it bends toward justice.

Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: Truth crushed
to earth will rise again. Let us go out realizing that the Bible
is right:

Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that
shall he also reap. This is for hope for the future, and with this
faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow with a
cosmic past tense, We have overcome, we have overcome, deep in my
heart, I did believe we would overcome.

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