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May 25 - July 18, 2021
I hear him preaching at his Ebenezer Church in Atlanta: “I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry…. This is the way I’m going. If it means suffering a little bit, I’m going that way. If it means sacrificing, I’m going that way. If it means dying for them, I’m going that way, because I heard a voice say, ‘Do something for others.’”
White America was ready to demand that the Negro should be spared the lash of brutality and coarse degradation, but it had never been truly committed to helping him out of poverty, exploitation or all forms of discrimination.
But the absence of brutality and unregenerate evil is not the presence of justice.
While there must be a continued emphasis on the need for blacks to pool their economic resources and withdraw consumer support from discriminating firms, we must not be oblivious to the fact that the larger economic problems confronting the Negro community will only be solved by federal programs involving billions of dollars.
Violence is the antithesis of creativity and wholeness. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible.
Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.
Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated.
Humanity is waiting for something other than blind imitation of the past.
Here, in the life of the father of our nation, we can see the developing dilemma of white America: the haunting ambivalence, the intellectual and moral recognition that slavery is wrong, but the emotional tie to the system so deep and pervasive that it imposes an inflexible unwillingness to root it out.
A civil war raged within Lincoln’s own soul, a tension between the Dr. Jekyll of freedom and the Mr. Hyde of slavery, a struggle like that of Plato’s charioteer with two head-strong horses each pulling in different directions. Morally Lincoln was for black emancipation, but emotionally, like most of his white contemporaries, he was for a long time unable to act in accordance with his conscience.
Are we more concerned with the size, power and wealth of our society or with creating a more just society?
To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.
Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated slums.
The Washington Post has calculated that we spend $332,000 for each enemy we kill. It challenges the imagination to contemplate what lives we could transform if we were to cease killing.
If the society changes its concepts by placing the responsibility on its system, not on the individual, and guarantees secure employment or a minimum income, dignity will come within reach of all.
Edmund Burke said on one occasion: “When evil men combine, good men must unite.”
When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men conspire to preserve an unjust status quo, good men must unite to bring about the birth of a society undergirded by justice.
Love that does not satisfy justice is no love at all. It is merely a sentimental affection, little more than what one would have for a pet.
The Constitution assured the right to vote, but there is no such assurance of the right to adequate housing, or the right to an adequate income. And yet, in a nation which has a gross national product of $750 billion a year, it is morally right to insist that every person have a decent house, an adequate education and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family.
People struggling from the depths of society have not been equipped with knowledge of the science of social change.
Education without social action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy. Deeds uninformed by educated thought can take false directions.
We need organizations that are permeated with mutual trust, incorruptibility and militancy. Without this spirit we may have numbers but they will add up to zero. We need organizations that are responsible, efficient and alert.
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.
We have come to the point where we must make the nonproducer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods.
Two conditions are indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society, not at the lowest levels of income. To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions. Second, the guaranteed income must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows. Were it permitted to remain static under growth conditions, the recipients would suffer a relative decline. If periodic reviews disclose
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The contemporary tendency in our society is to base our distribution on scarcity, which has vanished, and to compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity.
The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.
One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change.
So much of modern life can be summarized in that suggestive phrase of Thoreau: “Improved means to an unimproved end.”
Not too many years ago, Dr. Kirtley Mather, a Harvard geologist, wrote a book entitled Enough and to Spare.2 He set forth the basic theme that famine is wholly unnecessary in the modern world.
The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled and feed the unfed. The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible.
Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for “the least of these.”
We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother.
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understands that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family.
