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M.L. King - REMAINING AWAKE THROUGH A GREAT REVOLUTION
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Sunday, April 6, 2008
1:33:00 AM EDT
Hearing The Evil of Racism
[Rev. King delivered this sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. on March 31, 1968--four days before his assassination. I have shortened the text without changing the wording. As a tribute, it was printed in the Congressional Record five days after his death. I see a close connection between Part II of this sermon--against the "disease of war"--and his assassination.
The sermon was brought to my attention by Rosalio Muñoz whom I have known for thirty-eight years. He is a former student body president of UCLA and was the national coordinator of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, an anti-Vietnam War March that took place in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970. Well over 10,000 persons gathered and marched--including myself and some other Catholic clergy. It was the beginning of the PADRES organization in Southern California. About four people died in the protest, including L.A. TIMES reporter Ruben Salazar who, while escaping the melee in bar, was killed by a sheriff's projectile.
Because of space limitations on this blog, I have divided Rev. King's sermon into two parts. Part I of Rev.King's sermon takes on the evil of racism, and Part II the evil of war.--JR]
REMAINING AWAKE THROUGH A GREAT REVOLUTION
(Text of Sermon - Part I: The Evil of Racism)
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.....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 Washington—and looking at the picture he was amazed—he 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....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...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 bring 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...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.
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 man’s burden and the white man’s shame.It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spokenand unspoken,acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not sosubtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism [my emphasis]....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....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.... 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....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. It’s 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....How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out of India’s population of more than five hundred million people, some four hundred and eighty million make an annual income ofless that ninety dollars a year. And most of them have never seen a doctor or a dentist....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....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 isn’t worth sixty dollars."
Poor people are forced to pay more for less.Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t 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....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 world—and nothing’s wrong with that—this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.... 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 People’s Campaign.... 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 doesn’t 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....And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwillput 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 People’s 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....
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1:33:00 AM EDT
Hearing The Evil of Racism
M.L. King - REMAINING AWAKE THROUGH A GREAT REVOLUTION
[Rev. King delivered this sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. on March 31, 1968--four days before his assassination. I have shortened the text without changing the wording. As a tribute, it was printed in the Congressional Record five days after his death. I see a close connection between Part II of this sermon--against the "disease of war"--and his assassination.
The sermon was brought to my attention by Rosalio Muñoz whom I have known for thirty-eight years. He is a former student body president of UCLA and was the national coordinator of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, an anti-Vietnam War March that took place in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970. Well over 10,000 persons gathered and marched--including myself and some other Catholic clergy. It was the beginning of the PADRES organization in Southern California. About four people died in the protest, including L.A. TIMES reporter Ruben Salazar who, while escaping the melee in bar, was killed by a sheriff's projectile.
Because of space limitations on this blog, I have divided Rev. King's sermon into two parts. Part I of Rev.King's sermon takes on the evil of racism, and Part II the evil of war.--JR]
REMAINING AWAKE THROUGH A GREAT REVOLUTION
(Text of Sermon - Part I: The Evil of Racism)
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.....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 Washington—and looking at the picture he was amazed—he 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....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...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 bring 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...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.
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 man’s burden and the white man’s shame.It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast majority of white Americans, spokenand unspoken,acknowledged and denied, subtle and sometimes not sosubtle—the disease of racism permeates and poisons a whole body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work passionately and unrelentingly—to get rid of the disease of racism [my emphasis]....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....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.... 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....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. It’s 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....How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers that out of India’s population of more than five hundred million people, some four hundred and eighty million make an annual income ofless that ninety dollars a year. And most of them have never seen a doctor or a dentist....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....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 isn’t worth sixty dollars."
Poor people are forced to pay more for less.Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t 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....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 world—and nothing’s wrong with that—this is America’s opportunity to help bridge the gulf between the haves and the have-nots.... 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 People’s Campaign.... 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 doesn’t 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....And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwillput 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 People’s 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....
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