Martin Luther King - The Three Evils of Society
Episode Cover Photo Attribution - Bob Fitch Photography Archive, © Stanford University Libraries https://purl.stanford.edu/bc967hk3892 The Three Evils of Society - Transcript Delivered at the National Conference on New Politics, August 31, 1967. Mr. Chairman, friends and brothers in this first gathering of the National Conference on New Politics. Ladiesand gentlemen. . .can you hear me in the back? (No) I don’t know if the Klan is in here tonight or not with allthe troubles we’re having with these microphones. Seldom if ever. . . .has. . . .we’re still working with it. As I was about to say, seldom if ever has such a diverse and truly ecumenical gathering convened under the egis of politics in our nation, and I want to commend the leadership of the National Conference on NewPolitics for all of the great work that they have done in making this significant convention possible. Indeed byour very nature we affirm that something new is taking place on the American political horizon. We have comehere from the dusty plantations of the Deep South and the depressing ghettos of the North. We have come fromthe great universities and the flourishing suburbs. We have come from Appalachian poverty and from consciousstricken wealth. But we have come. And we have come here because we share a common concern for the moralhealth of our nation. We have come because our eyes have seen through the superficial glory and glitter of our society and observed the coming of judgment. Like the prophet of old, we have read the handwriting on the wall. We have seen our nation weighed in the balance of history and found wanting. We have come because wesee this as a dark hour in the affairs of men.For most of us this is a new mood. We are traditionally the idealists. We are the marchers fromMississippi and Selma and Washington, who staked our lives on the American Dream during the first half of this decade. Many assembled here campaigned lasciviously for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 because we could notstand ideally by and watch our nation contaminated by the 18th Century policies of Goldwaterism. We were thehardcore activists who were willing to believe that Southerners could be reconstructed in the constitutionalimage. We were the dreamers of a dream – that dark yesterdays of mans inhumanity to man would soon betransformed into bright tomorrows of justice. Now it is hard to escape, the disillusionment and betrayal. Our hopes have been blasted and our dreams have been shattered. The promise of a Great Society was shipwreckedoff the coast of Asia, on the dreadful peninsula of Vietnam. The poor, black and white, are still perishing on alonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. What happens to a dream deferred?It leads to bewildering frustration and corroding bitterness.I came to see this in a personal experience here in Chicago last summer. In all the speaking I have donein the United States before varied audiences, including some hostile whites, the only time I have ever been booed was one night in our regular weekly mass meetings by some angry young men of our movement. Now Iwent home that night with an ugly feeling. Selfishly I thought of my suffering and sacrifices over the last twelveyears. Why would they boo one so close to them? But as I lay awake thinking. I finally came to myself. And Icould not for the life of me have less impatience and understanding for those young men. For twelve years, I amothers like me, have held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I hadlectured to them about, the not to distant day when they would have freedom, all here, now. I had urged them tohave faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing me because they feltthat we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dreamthat they had so readily accepted, turn into a frustrating nightmare. This situation is all the more ominous, inview of the rising expectations of men the world over. The deep rumblings that we hear today, the rumblings of discontent, is the thunder of disinherited masses rising from dungeons of oppressions to the bright hills of freedom. All over the world like a fever, freedom is spreading in the widest liberation movement in history. Thegreat masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and lands. And in one majestic chorus they are singing in the worlds of our freedom song, “ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around”. And so the collision course is set. The people cry for freedom and the congress attempts to legislaterepression. Millions, yes billions, are appropriated for mass murder; but the most meager pittance for foreignaid for international development is crushed in the surge of reaction. Unemployment rages at a major depressionlevel in the black ghettos, but the bi-partisan response is an anti-riot bill rather than a serious poverty program.The modest proposals for model cities, rent supplement and rat control, pitiful as they were to began with, getcaught in the maze of congressional inaction. And I submit to you tonight, that a congress that proves to be more anti-negro than anti-rat needs to be dismissed. It seems that our legislative assemblies have adopted Nero as their patron saint and are bent on fiddling while our cities burn. Even when the people persist and in the face of great obstacles, develop indigenous leadership and self-help approaches to their problems and finally tread the forest of bureaucracy to obtain existing governmentfunds, the corrupt political order seeks to crush even this beginning of hope. The case of CDGM in Mississippiis the most publicized example but it is a story repeated many times across our nation.Our own experience here in Chicago is especially painfully present. After an enthusiastic approval by H.E. W’s Department of Adult Education, SCLC began an adult literacy project to aid 1,000 young men and women who have been pushed out of overcrowded ghetto schools, in obtaining basic [literary] skills prerequisite to receiving jobs. We had an agreement with A&P stores for 750 jobs through SCLC’s job program, Operation Breadbasket and had recruited over 500 pupils the first week. At that point CongressmenPaccinski and the Daley machine intervened and demanded that Washington cut off our funds or channel themthrough the machine controlled poverty program in Chicago. Now we have no problem with administrativesupervision, but we do have a desire to be independent of machine control and the Democratic Party patronagenetwork. For this desire for a politically independent approach to the needs of our brothers, our funds are beingstopped as of September 15th and a very meaningful program discontinued. Yes the hour is dark, evil comesfourth in the guise of good. It is a time of double talk when men in high places have a high blood pressure of deceptive rhetoric and an anemia of concrete performance.We cry out against welfare hand outs to the poor but generously approve an oil depletion allowance tomake the rich, richer. Six Mississippi plantations receive more than a million dollars a year, not to plant cotton but no provision is made to feed the tenant farmer who is put out of work by the government subsidy. Thecrowning achievement in hypocrisy must go to those staunch Republicans and Democrats of the Midwest andWest who were given land by our government when they came here as immigrants from Europe. They weregiven education through the land grant colleges. They were provided with agricultural agents to keep themabreast of forming trends, they were granted low interest loans to aid in the mechanization of their farms andnow that they have succeeded in becoming successful, they are paid not to farm and these are the same people that now say to black people, who’s ancestors were brought to this country in chains and who were emancipatedin 1863 without being given land to cultivate or bread to eat; that they must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. What they truly advocate is Socialism for the rich and Capitalism for the poor. I wish that I could say that this is just a passing phase in the cycles of our nation’s life; certainly times of war, times of reaction throughout the society but I suspect that we are now experiencing the coming to thesurface of a triple prong sickness that has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning. That isthe sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism. Not only is this our nation’s dilemma it is the plaque of western civilization. As early as 1906 W. E. B Dubois prophesized that the problem of the 20th century, would be the problem of the color line, now as we stand two-thirds into this crucial period of historywe know full well that racism is still that hound of hell which dogs the tracks of our civilization. Ever since the birth of our nation, White America has had a Schizophrenic personality on the question of race, she has beentorn between selves. A self in which she proudly profess the great principle of democracy and a self in whichshe madly practices the antithesis of democracy. This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness andambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backwards simultaneously with every stepforward on the question of Racial Justice; to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love andto hate him. There has never been a solid, unified and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans. The step backwards has a new name today, it is called the white backlash, but the white backlash isnothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there. Itwas caused neither by the cry
