Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (King Legacy Book 2)

by Martin Luther King Jr.

I recalled the story of her being questioned by a reporter at the historic 1964 Democratic National Convention and asked about her powerful challenge on behalf of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the convention’s acceptance of segregated delegations. Did her vigorous antisegregation stand mean that “she was seeking equality with the white man?” the reporter asked. “No,” Ms. Hamer firmly replied. “What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don’t want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that’ll raise me and the white man up … raise America up.”

Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.

But they are balanced at the other end of the pole by the unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality.

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.

The Black Power movement of today, like the Garvey “Back to Africa” movement of the 1920s, represents a dashing of hope, a conviction of the inability of the Negro to win and a belief in the infinitude of the ghetto. While there is much grounding in past experience for all these feelings, a revolution cannot succumb to any of them. Today’s despair is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow’s justice.

If a man asserts that another man, because of his race, is not good enough to have a job equal to his, or to eat at a lunch counter next to him, or to have access to certain hotels, or to attend school with him, or to live next door to him, he is by implication affirming that that man does not deserve to exist. He does not deserve to exist because his existence is corrupt and defective.

It seems to be a fact of life that human beings cannot continue to do wrong without eventually reaching out for some rationalization to clothe their acts in the garments of righteousness.

A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. It is the desperate, suicidal cry of one who is so fed up with the powerlessness of his cave existence that he asserts that he would rather be dead than ignored.

A society that has treated a whole race of people as flotsam and jetsam in the river of life cannot expect all of them to grow up healthy and well balanced.

This sense of somebodyness means the refusal to be ashamed of being black. Our children must be taught to stand tall with their heads proudly lifted.

Mass nonviolent action will continue to be one of the most effective tactics of the freedom movement. Many, especially in the North, argue that the maximum use of legislation, welfare and antipoverty programs has now replaced demonstrations, and that overt and visible protest should now be abandoned. Nothing could prove more erroneous than to demobilize at this point. It was the mass-action movement that engendered the changes of the decade, but the needs which created it are not yet satisfied. Without the will to unity and struggle Negroes would have no strength, and reversal of our successes could be easily effected. The use of creative tensions that broke the barriers of the South will be as indispensable in the North to obtain and extend necessary objectives.

This argument, by explaining everything in terms of the presence or absence of programs, illuminates how the insistence on program can be used as a sophisticated device to evade action.

The other economic lever available to the Negro is as a consumer. As long ago as 1932, in his book Moral Man and Immoral Society, Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out that “boycotts against banks which discriminate against Negroes in quantity credit, against stores which refuse to employ Negroes while serving Negro trade, and against public service corporations which practice racial discrimination, would undoubtedly be crowned with some measure of success.”1 These words have proved to be prophetic, for we have been seeing the success of this approach in the last few years.

When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom.

hate and hysteria are not the final answers to the problems of these turbulent days.

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.