There is a literal depression in the Negro community. When you have mass unemployment in the Negro community, it’s called a social problem; when you have mass unemployment in the white community, it’s called a depression. The fact is, there is a major depression in the Negro community.



We need an economic bill of rights. This would guarantee a job to all people who want to work and are able to work. It would also guarantee an income for all who are not able to work. Some people are too young, some are too old, some are physically disabled, and yet in order to live, they need income.

We feel that much more building of housing for low-income people should be done. On the educational front, the ghetto schools are in bad shape in terms of quality. Often, they are so far behind that they need more and special attention, the best quality education that can be given.

These problems, of course, are overshadowed by the Vietnam war. We’ll focus on the domestic problems, but it’s inevitable that we’ve got to bring out the question of the tragic mix-up in priorities. We are spending all of this money for death and destruction, and not nearly enough money for life and constructive development.

We hear all this talk about our ability to afford guns and butter, but we have come to see that this is a myth, that when a nation becomes involved in this kind of war, when the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer.

And we hope that as a result of our trying to dramatize this and getting thousands and thousands of people moving around this issue, that our government will be forced to re-evaluate its policy abroad in order to deal with the domestic situation.

Martin Luther King's forgotten legacy? His fight for economic justice | Michael K Honey Read more

We need to put pressure on Congress to get things done. We will do this with first amendment activity. If Congress is unresponsive, we’ll have to escalate in order to keep the issue alive and before it. This action may take on disruptive dimensions, but not violent in the sense of destroying life or property: it will be militant non-violence.



Riots tend to intensify the fears of the white majority while relieving its guilt, and so open the door to greater repression. We’ve seen no changes in Watts, no structural changes have taken place as the result of riots.



We are trying to find an alternative that will force people to confront issues without destroying life or property. We plan to build a shantytown in Washington, patterned after the bonus marches of the 30s, to dramatize how many people have to live in slums in our nation.

Demonstrations have served as unifying forces in the movement; they have brought blacks and whites together in very practical situations, where philosophically they may have been arguing about Black Power. It’s a strange thing how demonstrations tend to solve problems.

Anytime we’ve had demonstrations in a community, people have found a way to slough off their self-hatred, and they have had a channel to express their longings and a way to fight non-violently – to get at the power structure, to know you’re doing something, so you don’t have to be violent to do it.

We need this movement. We need it to bring about a new kind of togetherness between blacks and whites. We need it to bring allies together and to bring the coalition of conscience together.

I think we have come to the point where there is no longer a choice now between non-violence and riots. It must be militant, massive non-violence, or riots.

The discontent is so deep, the anger so ingrained, the despair, the restlessness so wide, that something has to be brought into being to serve as a channel through which these deep emotional feelings, these deep angry feelings, can be funneled.

There has to be an outlet, and I see this campaign as a way to transmute the inchoate rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative channel. It becomes an outlet for anger.



Even if I didn’t deal with the moral dimensions and question of violence versus non-violence, from a practical point of view, I don’t see riots working.

But I am convinced that if rioting continues, it will strengthen the right wing of the country, and we’ll end up with a kind of rightwing take-over in the cities and a Fascist development, which will be terribly injurious to the whole nation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Rev Martin Luther King Jr and his wife Coretta Scott King. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

I don’t think America can stand another summer of Detroit-like riots without a development that could destroy the soul of the nation, and even the democratic possibilities of the nation.

I’m committed to non-violence absolutely. I’m just not going to kill anybody, whether it’s in Vietnam or here. I’m not going to burn down any building.

If non-violent protest fails this summer, I will continue to preach it and teach it.

I plan to stand by non-violence because I have found it to be a philosophy of life that regulates not only my dealings in the struggle for racial justice but also my dealings with people, with my own self. I will still be faithful to non-violence.

But I’m frank enough to admit that if our non-violent campaign doesn’t generate some progress, people are just going to engage in more violent activity, and the discussion of guerrilla warfare will be more extensive.

In any event, we will not have been the ones who will have failed. We will place the problems of the poor at the seat of government of the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind. If that power refuses to acknowledge its debt to the poor, it will have failed to live up to its promise to insure “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to its citizens.

If this society fails, I fear that we will learn very shortly that racism is a sickness unto death.

There is an Old Testament prophecy of the “sins of the Fathers being visited upon the third and the fourth generations”. Nothing could be more applicable to our situation. America is reaping the harvest of hate and shame planted through generations of educational denial, political disfranchisement and economic exploitation of its black population.

Now, almost a century removed from slavery, we find the heritage of oppression and racism erupting in our cities, with volcanic lava of bitterness and frustration pouring down our avenues.

Black Americans have been patient people, and perhaps they could continue patient with but a modicum of hope; but everywhere, “time is winding up”, in the words of one of our spirituals, “corruption in the land, people take your stand; time is winding up”.

In spite of years of national progress, the plight of the poor is worsening. Jobs are on the decline as a result of technological change, schools north and south are proving themselves more and more inadequate to the task of providing adequate education and thereby entrance into the mainstream of the society. Medical care is virtually out of reach of millions of black and white poor. In Mississippi, children are actually starving.

White America has allowed itself to be indifferent to race prejudice and economic denial. It has treated them as superficial blemishes, but now awakes to the horrifying reality of a potentially fatal disease. The urban outbreaks are “a fire bell in the night”, clamorously warning that the seams of our entire social order are weakening under strains of neglect.

The American people are infected with racism – that is the peril. Paradoxically, they are also infected with democratic ideals – that is the hope.

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While doing wrong, they have the potential to do right. But they do not have a millennium to make changes. Nor have they a choice of continuing in the old way.

The future they are asked to inaugurate is not so unpalatable that it justifies the evils that beset the nation. To end poverty, to extirpate prejudice, to free a tormented conscience, to make a tomorrow of justice, fair play and creativity – all these are worthy of the American ideal.

We have, through massive non-violent action, an opportunity to avoid a national disaster and create a new spirit of class and racial harmony. We can write another luminous moral chapter in American history.

All of us are on trial in this troubled hour, but time still permits us to meet the future with a clear conscience.

