King’s Words In 1968 Still Ring True: ‘It’s Non-Violence Or Non-Existence’
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I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
– Martin Luther King Jr.
Whenever you think things are too much, remember that.
I’ll suggest you read or listen to all of King’s last speech from April 3, 1968. The “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, given the evening before he was assassinated. If you don’t have the time, here are selected pieces of it.
“And another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we’re going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demand didn’t force them to do it. 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.”
“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”
“We don’t have to argue with anybody. We don’t have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don’t need any bricks and bottles, we don’t need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, ‘God sent us by here, to say to you that you’re not treating his children right. And we’ve come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment, where God’s children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.’ “
In the speech, Dr. King also talks about an earlier assault on his life and his premonition that he might not live to see real justice and equality in America. And most people commenting on his last speech focus on that. I’d like to note the speech was in the context of a pay equality protest for the sanitation workers in Memphis and as such, is really an economic equality speech. About fair pay and what is fair and equal in this life we all have in America.
Last Monday, the President Trump appointed 1776 Commission released a report. The commission had its first meeting on January 5, 2021. The 41-page report, released on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, is largely an attack on decades of historical scholarship, particularly when it comes to the nation’s 400-year-old legacy of slavery. There are 20 members of the commission, most are not historians. One of the members is Phil Bryant, former governor of Mississippi.