In 2008, the year the Democrats will chose Barack Obama as their nominee for President, this speech from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., could be described as "the fierce urgency of now" speech. But King gave this speech on April 4th, precisely one year before his assassination, and on this April 4th instead of highlighting his death, I think it makes sense to highlight his leadership, on foreign adventures, and on the abiding hope of some Americans that this country can overcome its purveying of violence and recover its soul:
As I have walked among the
desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov
cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer
them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social
change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked
— and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation
wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring
about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I
could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in
the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor
of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those
boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of
thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
For those who ask the question, "Aren’t you a civil rights leader?" and
thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this
further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of
America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain
rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America
would never be free or saved from itself unless the descendants of its
slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way
we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had
written earlier:
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!
Kit Stolz 