Martin Luther King, Jr. On War and Peace
A dramatic reading compiled by Clayborne Carson based on King's
writings and public statements
TITLE
"An Autobiography of Religious Development."
KING
I was born in a very congenial home situation. My parents have always lived
together very intimately, and I can hardly remember a time that they ever argued
(my father happens to be the kind who just won't argue) or had any great falling
out. The community in which I was born was quite ordinary in terms of social
status. No one in our community had attained any great wealth. Crime was at a
minimum, and most of our neighbors were deeply religious. One may ask at this
point, why discuss such factors as the above in dealing with one's religious
development? The answer to this question lies in the fact that the above factors
were highly significant in determining my religious attitudes. It is quite easy
for me to think of a God of love mainly because I grew up in a family where love
was central and where lovely relationships were present. It is quite easy for me
to think of the universe as basically friendly, mainly because of my uplifting
hereditary and environmental circumstances. It is quite easy for me to lean more
toward optimism than pessimism about human nature, mainly because of my
childhood experience.
TITLE
"Pilgrimage to Nonviolence."
KING
Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were
only effective in individual relationships. The "turn the other cheek"
philosophy and the "love your enemies" philosophy were only valid, I felt, when
individuals were in conflict with other individuals; when racial groups and
nations were in conflict, a more realistic approach seemed necessary. But after
reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was.
Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus
above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social
force on a large scale. Love for Gandhi was a potent instrument for social and
collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and
nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been
seeking.
I do not want to give the impression that nonviolence will work miracles
overnight. When the underprivileged demand freedom, the privileged first react
with bitterness and resistance. Even when the demands are couched in nonviolent
terms, the initial response is the same. So the nonviolent approach does not
immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the
hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it
calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had.
Finally, it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation
becomes a reality.
I have come to see more and more the need for the method of nonviolence in
international relations. While I was convinced during my student days of the
power of nonviolence in group conflicts within nations, I was not yet convinced
of its efficacy in conflicts between nations. I felt that while war could never
be a positive or absolute good, it could serve as a negative good in the sense
of preventing the spread and growth of an evil force. War, I felt, horrible as
it is, might be preferable to surrender to a totalitarian system. But more and
more I have come to the conclusion that the potential destructiveness of modern
weapons of war totally rules out the possibility of war ever serving again as a
negative good. If we assume that mankind has a right to survive then we must
find an alternative to war and destruction. In a day when sputniks dash through
outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through
the stratosphere, nobody can win a war. The choice today is no longer between
violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence.
I am no doctrinaire pacifist. I have tried to embrace a realistic pacifism.
Moreover, I see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser evil in
the circumstances. Therefore I do not claim to be free from the moral dilemmas
that the Christian nonpacifist confronts. But I am convinced that the church
cannot remain silent while mankind faces the threat of being plunged into the
abyss of nuclear annihilation. If the church is true to its mission it must call
for an end to the arms race.
TITLE
"The Social Organization of Nonviolence"
KING
It is axiomatic in social life that frustrations leads to two kinds of
reactions. One is the development of a wholesome social organization to resist
with effective, firm measures any efforts to impede progress. The other is a
confused, anger-motivated drive to strike back violently, to retaliate for
wrongful suffering.
The current calls for violence have their roots in this latter tendency. Here
one must be clear that there are three different views on the subject of
violence. One is the approach of pure nonviolence, which cannot readily or
easily attract large masses, for it requires extraordinary discipline and
courage. The second is violence exercised in self-defense, which all societies,
from the most primitive to the most cultured and civilized, accept as moral and
legal. The principle of self-defense, even involving weapons and bloodshed, has
never been condemned, even by Gandhi, who sanctioned it for those unable to
master pure nonviolence. The third is the advocacy of violence as a tool of
advancement, organized as in warfare, deliberately and consciously. There are
incalculable perils in this approach. The greatest danger is that it will fail
to attract Negroes to a real collective struggle. There are meaningful
alternatives to violence. In the history of the movement for racial advancement,
many creative forms have been developed—the mass boycott, sitdown protests and
strikes, sit-ins, refusal to pay fines and bail for unjust arrests, mass
marches, mass meetings, prayer pilgrimages, etc. There is more power in socially
organized masses on the march than there is in guns in the hands of a few
desperate men. Our enemies would prefer to deal with a small armed group rather
than with a huge, unarmed but resolute mass of people. However, it is necessary
that the mass-action method be persistent and unyielding. All history teaches us
that like a turbulent ocean beating great cliffs into fragments of rock, the
determined movement of people incessantly demanding their rights always
disintegrates the old order. Our powerful weapons are the voices, the feet, and
the bodies of dedicated, united people, moving without rest toward a just goal.
Greater tyrants than Southern segregationists have been subdued and defeated by
this form of struggle. It would be tragic if we spurn it because we have failed
to perceive its dynamic strength and power.
I am reluctant to inject a personal defense against charges that I am
inconsistent in my struggle against war and too weak-kneed to protest nuclear
war. Merely to set the record straight, may I state that repeatedly, in public
addresses and in my writings, I have unequivocally declared my hatred for this
most colossal of all evils and I have condemned any organizer of war, regardless
of his rank or nationality.
TITLE
"Acceptance Address for the Nobel Peace Prize."
KING
I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious
faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so
tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright
daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. I refuse to accept
the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic
stairway into the hell of nuclear annihilation.
KING
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in
reality.
This is why right, temporarily defeated,
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
is stronger than evil triumphant.
KING
I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a
day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity,
equality, and freedom for their spirits.
I believe that what self-centered men have torn down,
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
other-centered men can build up.
KING
I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be
crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed and nonviolent redemptive goodwill
proclaimed the rule of the land. And the lion and the lamb shall lie down
together, and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none
shall be afraid.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
I still believe that we shall overcome.
TITLE
"Nobel Peace Prize Lecture"
KING
I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary
results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite
of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no
social problems, it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is
impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It
is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his
understanding. It seeks to annihilate rather than convert. It destroys community
and makes brotherhood impossible. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates
bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. Nonviolence is a
powerful and just weapon. It was used in a magnificent way by Mohandas K. Gandhi
to challenge the might of the British empire and free his people from the
political domination and economic exploitation inflicted upon them for
centuries. He struggled only with the weapon of truth, soul force. In the past
ten years, unarmed gallant men and women of the United States have given living
testimony to the moral power and efficacy of nonviolence. By the thousands,
relentless young people, black and white, have temporarily left the ivory towers
of learning to storm the barricades of bias. One day all of America will be
proud of their achievements. I am still convinced that nonviolence is both the
most practically sound and morally excellent way to grapple with the age-old
problem of racial injustice.
A second evil which plagues the modern world is that of poverty. Almost
two-thirds of the peoples of the world go to bed hungry at night. They are
undernourished, ill-housed and shabbily clad. So it is obvious that if man is to
redeem his spiritual and moral lag, he must go all-out to bridge the social and
economic gulf between the haves and the have-nots of the world. Poverty is one
of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern life. There is nothing new
about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of
it. Just as nonviolence exposed the ugliness of racial injustice, so must the
infection and sickness of poverty be exposed and healed, not only its symptoms
but its basic causes. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth
to develop the undeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed.
Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation; no individual or nation can
be great if it does not have a concern for the least of these. In the final
analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor, because both rich and poor are tied
together in a single garment of destiny—for life is interrelated and all men are
interdependent. The agony of the poor diminishes the rich, and the salvation of
the poor enlarges the rich.
A third great evil confronting our world is that of war. Recent events have
vividly reminded us that nations are not reducing, but rather increasing their
arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The proliferation of nuclear weapons
has not been halted. The fact that most of the time human beings put the risk of
the nuclear war out of their minds because it is too painful and therefore not
acceptable does not alter the risk of such a war. So man's proneness to engage
in war is still a fact, but wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is
obsolete. No nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave
little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil and
political disillusionment. A world war, God forbid, would leave only smoldering
ashes as a mute testimony to the human race whose folly led inexorably to
ultimate death. And so if modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war,
he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno such as even the mind of
Dante could not imagine.
Therefore I venture to suggest, to all of you and all who hear and may
eventually read these words, that the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence
become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every
field of human conflict, by no means excluding the relations between nations. It
is, after all, nation states which have produced the weapons which threaten the
survival of mankind and which are both genocidal and suicidal in character. It
is as imperative and urgent to put an end to war and violence between nations as
it is to put an end to racial injustice.
It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and
sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of
war, but on the positive affirmation of peace. In short, we must shift the arms
race into the peace race. Some years ago a novelist died, among his papers was
found a list of suggested plots for further stories, the most prominently
underscored being this one: A widely separated family inherits a house in which
they have to live together. This is a great new problem of mankind. We have
inherited a big house, a great world house in which we have to live together,
black men and white men, easterners and westerners, gentiles and Jews, Catholics
and Protestants, Muslims and Hindus. A family unduly separated in ideas,
culture, and interest, who, because we can never again live without each other,
must learn somehow, in this one big world house, to live with each other.
And this is our great challenge. This means that more and more, our loyalties
must become ecumenical rather than sectional. We must now give an overriding
loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in our individual
societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern
beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an
all-embracing, an unconditional love for all men. I'm not speaking of some
sentimental and weak response which is little more than emotional bosh. I'm
speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as a supreme
unifying principle of life.
TITLE
"Journey of Conscience."
KING
All my adult life I have deplored violence and war as instruments for achieving
solutions to mankind's problems. I am firmly committed to the creative power of
nonviolence as the force which is capable of winning lasting and meaningful
brotherhood and peace. Despite this—whether right or wrong—in the summer and
fall of 1965, I believed that it was essential for all Americans to publicly
avoid the debate on why we were waging war in the far-off lands of Vietnam.
Accepting this premise, my public statements, while condemning all militarism,
were directed mainly to the mechanics for achieving an immediate cessation of
hostilities. I did not march, I did not demonstrate, I did not rally. For a
while, knowing that my wife shares my passion for peace, I decided that I would
leave it to her to take the stands and make the meetings on the peace issue and
leave me to concentrate on civil rights. But as the hopeful days became
disappointing months, we watched setbacks in the search for peace and advances
in the search for military advantage.
I saw an orderly buildup of evil, an accumulation of inhumanities, each of which
alone is sufficient to make men hide in shame. What was woeful, but true, was
that my country was only talking peace but was bent on military victory. Inside
the glove of peace was the clenched fist of war. I now stood naked with shame
and guilt, as indeed every German should have when his government was using its
military power to overwhelm other nations. Whether right or wrong, I had for too
long allowed myself to be a silent onlooker. At best, I was a loud speaker but a
quiet actor, while a charade was being performed.
Often I had castigated those who by silence or inaction condoned and thereby
cooperated with the evils of racial injustice. Had I not, again and again, said
that the silent onlooker must bear the responsibility for the brutalities
committed by the Bull Connors, or by the murderers of the innocent children in a
Birmingham church? Had I not committed myself to the principle that looking away
from evil is, in effect, a condonation of it? Those who lynch, pull the trigger,
point the cattle prod, or open the fire hoses act in the name of the silent. I
had to therefore speak out if I was to erase my name from the bombs which fall
over North or South Vietnam, from the canisters of napalm. The time had
come—indeed it was past due—when I had to disavow and dissociate myself from
those who, in the name of peace, burn, maim, and kill. As I moved to break the
betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart—as I
called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam—many persons
questioned me about the wisdom of my path: "Why are you speaking about the war,
Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights
don't mix," they say. And when I hear them, though I often understand the source
of their concern, I nevertheless am greatly saddened that such questions mean
that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling. They
seem to forget that before I was a civil rights leader, I answered a call, and
when God speaks, who can but prophesy. I answered a call which left the spirit
of the Lord upon me and anointed me to preach the gospel. And during the early
days of my ministry, I read the Apostle Paul saying, "Be ye not conformed to
this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of minds." I decided then that
I was going to tell the truth as God revealed it to me. No matter how many
people disagreed with me, I decided that I was going to tell the truth.
More than that, I had to go from the pulpits and platforms. I had to return to
the streets to mobilize men to assemble and petition, in the spirit of our own
revolutionary history, for the immediate end of this bloody, immoral, obscene
slaughter—for a cause which cries out for a solution before mankind itself is
doomed. I could do no less for the salvation of my soul.
TITLE
"Beyond Vietnam, Address at Riverside Church"
KING
I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves
me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement
with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together, Clergy
and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive
committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord
when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." That
time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the
war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few
years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was
a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty
program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in
Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some
idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war.
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.
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.
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 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 seem to him that our
nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we
have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence
of U. S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability
for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American
forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against
guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have
already been active against rebels in Peru.
It is with such activities in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy
come back to haunt us. 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 investments. I am
convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as
a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the
shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines
and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important
than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism
are incapable of being conquered.
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and
justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called
to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial
act. 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 the veins of peoples normally humane, of
sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and
psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A
nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense
than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
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.
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 are rising up as never before. 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.
TITLE
"Address at SCLC Ministers Leadership Training Program."
KING
I read Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, and many of the
revolutionary movements in the world came into being as a result of what Marx
talked about. The great tragedy is that Christianity failed to see that it had
the revolutionary edge. You don't have to go to Karl Marx to learn how to be a
revolutionary. I didn't get my inspiration from Karl Marx; I got it from a man
named Jesus, a Galilean saint who said he was anointed to heal the
broken-hearted. He was anointed to deal with the problems of the poor. And that
is where we get our inspiration.
We have the power to change America and give a kind of new vitality to the
religion of Jesus Christ. And we can get those young men and women who've lost
faith in the church to see that Jesus was a serious man precisely because he was
concerned about their problems. The greatest revolutionary that history has ever
known.
[Pause] When I first took my position against the war in Vietnam, almost every
newspaper in the country criticized me. It was a low period in my life. I could
hardly open a newspaper. It wasn't only white people either.
I remember a newsman coming to me one day saying, "Dr. King, don't you think
you're going to have to change your position now because so many people are
criticizing you? And people who once had respect for you are going to lose
respect for you. And you're going to hurt the budget, I understand, of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference; people have cut off support. And don't
you think that you have to move now more in line with the administration's
policy?" That was a good question, because he was asking me the question of
whether I was going to think about what happens to me or what happens to truth
and justice in this situation.
On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?" Expediency asks
the question, "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question, "Is
it popular?" But Conscience asks the question, "Is it right?" And there comes a
time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor
popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.
TITLE
"To Charter Our Course for the Future."
KING
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience,
but where he stands in moments of challenge, moments of great crisis and
controversy. And this is where I choose to cast my lot today. There may be
others who want to go another way, but when I took up the cross I recognized its
meaning. It is not something that you merely put your hands on. It is not
something that you wear. The cross is something that you bear and ultimately
that you die on. The cross may mean the death of your popularity. It may mean
the death of your bridge to the White House. It may mean the death of a
foundation grant. It may cut your budget down a little, but take up your cross
and just bear it. And that is the way I have decided to go.
TITLE
"Sermon at Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church."
KING
If you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will
die for it, then you aren't fit to live. You may be thirty-eight years old, as I
happen to be, and one day some great principle, some great opportunity stands
before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great issue, some great
cause. And you refused to do it because you want to live longer. You're afraid
that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or
that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid that somebody will stab you
or shoot at you or bomb your house.
So you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are
ninety, but you are just as dead at thirty-eight as you would be at ninety. And
the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announced of an
earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
You died when you refused to stand up for truth.
KING
You died when you refused to stand up for justice. Don't ever think that you're
by yourself. Go on to jail if necessary,
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
but you never go alone.
KING
Take a stand
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
for that which is right.
KING
And the world may misunderstand you, and criticize you. But you never go alone,
for somewhere I read that one with God is a majority.
TITLE
"I've Been to the Mountaintop."
KING
If I were standing at the beginning of time with the possibility of taking a
kind of general and panoramic view of the whole human history up to now, and the
Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?"
Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty and say, "If you allow me to live
just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy."
Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The
nation is sick; trouble is in the land, confusion all around. But I know,
somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God
working in this period in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding —
something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And
wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South
Africa; or Memphis, Tennessee, the cry is always the same: "We want to be free."
And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been
forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that
men have been trying to grapple with through history. Survival demands that we
grapple with them. Men for years now have been talking about war and peace. But
now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between
violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That
is where we are today.
And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and done in a
hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of
poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed.
Now, I'm just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period, to see what
is unfolding. And I'm happy that he's allowed me to be in Memphis saying that we
are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying, we are
saying that we are God's children. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in
disarming police forces; they don't know what to do. I've seen them so often. I
remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there,
we would move out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church day after day and Bull
Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come. But we just
went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around." Bull
Connor next would say, "Turn the fire hoses on."
Bull Connor didn't know history. He knew a kind of physics that somehow didn't
relate to the transphysics that we knew about. And that was the fact that there
was a certain kind of fire that no water could put out.
Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater
determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of
challenge, to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunity to make
America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to
be here with you.
I don't know what will happen now; we've got some difficult days ahead. But it
really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I
don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its
place. But I'm not concern about that now. I just want to do God's will. And
He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen
the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight,
that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I'm happy tonight;
I'm not worried about anything; I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the
glory of the coming of the Lord.
TITLE
"The Drum Major Instinct"
KING
Every now and then I guess we all think realistically about that day when we
will be victimized with what is life's final common denominator--that something
we call death. We all think about it. And every now and then I think about my
own death, and I think about my own funeral. And I don't think of it in a morbid
sense. Every now and then I ask myself. "What is it that I would want said?"
I'd like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to
give his life serving others. I'd like for somebody to say that day, that Martin
Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody.
I want you to say that day,
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
That I tried to be right on the war question.
KING
I want you to be able to say that day,
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
That I did try to feed the hungry.
KING
And I want you to be able to say that day,
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
That I did try, in my life, to clothe those who were naked.
KING
I want you to say, on that day,
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
That I did try, in my life, to visit those who were in prison.
KING
I want you to say,
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
That I tried to love and to serve humanity.
KING
Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for
justice.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
Say that I was a drum major for peace.
KING
I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will
not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and
luxurious things of life to leave behind.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE
But I just want to leave a committed life behind.
Closing Song … Joan Baez
Benediction … Rev. Jonathan Staples, Jerusalem Baptist Church
Sources of Texts for "King on War and Peace:
"An Autobiography of Religious Development," 1950, in Clayborne Carson, Ralph E.
Luker, Penny A. Russell, eds., The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume I:
Called To Serve, January 1929 - June 1951 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992.
"Pilgrimage to Nonviolence," Christian Century, April 13, 1960, in Clayborne
Carson, Tenisha Armstrong, Susan Carson, Adrienne Clay, and Kerry Taylor, eds.,
The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume V: Threshold of a New Decade,
January 1959 - December 1960 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
forthcoming).
"The Social Organization of Nonviolence," Liberation (October 1959) in Papers of
Martin Luther King, Jr., Volume IV.
"Acceptance Address for the Nobel Peace Prize," December 10, 1964, in Clayborne
Carson and Kris Shepard, A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 2001), pp. 105-109.
Nobel Peace Prize Lecture, December 11, 1964, King Papers collection at King
Library and Archive, Martin Luther King, Jr., Center, Atlanta.
"Journey of Conscience," unpublished handwritten preliminary draft of "Beyond
Vietnam" speech, in Clayborne Carson, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Luther
King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998), pp. 333-336.
"Beyond Vietnam," address at Riverside Church, New York, April 4, 1967, in
Carson and Shepard, eds., A Call to Conscience, pp. 139-164.
"To Chart Our Course for the Future," Address at SCLC Ministers Leadership
Training Program, Miami, February 23, 1968, recording in King Library and
Archive, King Center, Atlanta, in Carson, ed., The Autobiography of Martin
Luther King, Jr., p. 351, 342, 343.
"To Charter Our Course for the Future," Address to SCLC staff, Frogmore, South
Carolina, May 22, 1967, in Carson, ed., The Autobiography of Martin Luther King,
Jr., p. 342-343.
Sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, November 5, 1967, in Carson, ed.,
Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 344.
"I've Been to the Mountaintop," address at Bishop Charles J. Mason Temple,
Memphis, April 3, 1968, in Carson and Shepard, eds, A Call to Conscience, pp.
207-223.
"The Drum Major Instinct," sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, February
4, 1968, in Carson and Peter Holloran, A Knock at Midnight: Inspiration from the
Great Sermons of Revered Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998),
pp. 169-186.
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