On a day when we are called to remember and renew our calling, let us
hear what a real dream sounded like, a
year before King was murdered.
From, The Trumpet of
Conscience, Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper & Row, 1967:
“I have said that the problem, the crisis we face, is
international in scope. In fact, it is inseparable from an international
emergency which involves the poor, the dispossessed, and the exploited of the
whole world.
Can a nonviolent, direct-action movement find application on
the international level, to confront economic and political problems? I believe it can. It is clear to me that the next stage of the
movement is to become international.
National movements, within the developed countries – forces that focus
on London, or Paris, or Washington, or Ottawa – must help to make it
politically feasible for their governments to undertake the kind of massive aid
that the developing countries need if they are to break the chains of poverty. We in the West must bear in mind that the
poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through
political or economic colonialism.
Americans in particular must help their nation repent of her modern
economic imperialism.
But movements in our countries alone will not be enough. In
Latin America, for example, national reform movements have almost despaired of
nonviolent methods; many young men, even many priests, have joined guerrilla
movements in the hills. So many of Latin
America’s problems have roots in the United States of America that we need to
form a solid, united movement, nonviolently conceived and carried through, so
that pressure can be brought to bear on the capital and government power
structures concerned, from both sides of the problem at once. I think that may be the only hope for a
nonviolent solution in Latin America today; and one of the most powerful
expressions of nonviolence may come out of that international coalition of
socially aware forces, operating outside governmental frameworks.
....Indeed, although it is obvious that nonviolent movements
for social change must internationalize, because of the interlocking nature of
the problems they all face, and because otherwise those problems will breed
war, we have hardly begun to build the skills and the strategy, or even the
commitment, to planetize our movement for social justice.
In a world facing the revolt of the ragged and hungry masses
of God’s children, in a world torn between the tensions of the East and West,
white and colored, individualists and collectivists, in a world whose cultural
and spiritual power lags so far behind her technological capabilities that we
live each day on the verge of nuclear co-annihilation; in this world,
nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis, it is an
imperative for action.”
[in A Testament of
Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by James M.
Washington. Harper & Row. 1967. pp. 652-53]
**********
From, Where Do We Go
From Here: Chaos or Community? Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper & Row. 1967:
“We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow
before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by
the ever-rising tides of hate. History
is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals who pursued this self-defeating
path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee once said
in a speech: ‘Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of
life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory
must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.’
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We
are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of
life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of
time. Life often leaves us standing
bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not
pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues
of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’
There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance
or our neglect. ‘The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on...’ We
still have a choice today: nonviolent
coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance
to choose between chaos and community.”
[in A Testament of
Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited by James M.
Washington. Harper & Row. 1967. pp. 632-33]
21 January 2019
