The autobiography of martin luther

for: a massive movement for economic sanctions.

"I accept this award with an abiding faith"

This was, for most of us, our first trip to Scandinavia, and we looked

forward to making many new friends. We felt we had much to learn

fi-om Scandinavia's democratic socialist tradition and from the man-

ner in which they had overcome many of the social and economic

problems that still plagued far more powerful and affluent nations.

In both Norway and Sweden, whose economies are literally dwarfed

by the size of our affluence and the extent of our technology, they

have no unemployment and no slums. Their men, women, and chil-

dren have long enjoyed free medical care and quality education. This

contrast to the limited, halting steps taken by our rich nation deeply

troubled me.

I brought greetings from many Americans of goodwill, Negro

and white, who were committed to the struggle for brotherhood and

to the crusade for world peace. On their behalf I had come to Oslo

to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. It was indeed a privilege to receive

the Nobel Prize on behalf of the nonviolent movement, and I

pledged that the entire prize of approximately $54,000 would be

used to further the movement.

/ accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an

audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept the idea

that the "is-ness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable

of reaching up for the eternal "ought-ness" that forever confronts him.

I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the

river of life which surrounds him. I refuse to accept the view that man-

kind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war

that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a

reality. I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining

bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that

wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our na-

tions, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the

children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere

can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for

their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. I be-

lieve that what self-centered men have torn down, other-centered men

can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow down before

the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed,

and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land.

I still believe that we shall overcome. This faith can give us courage to

face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new

strength as we continue our forward stride toward the City of Freedom.

Today I come to Oslo as a trustee, inspired and with renewed dedi-

cation to humanity. I accept this prize on behalf of all men who love

peace and brotherhood.

I fought hard to hold back the tears. My emotions were about to

overflow. Whatever I was, I owed to my family and to all those who

struggled with me. But my biggest debt I owed to my wife. She was

the one who gave my life meaning. All I could pledge to her, and to

all those millions, was that I would do all I could to justif)^ the faith

that she, and they, had in me. I would try more than ever to make

my life one of which she, and they, could be proud. I would do in

private that which I knew my public responsibility demanded.

"What now?"

The Nobel Peace Prize was a proud honor, but not one with which

we began a "season of satisfaction" in the civil rights movement. We

returned from Oslo not with our heads in the clouds, congratulating

ourselves for marvelous yesterdays and tempted to declare a holiday

in our struggle, but with feet even more firmly on the ground, con-

victions strengthened and determinations driven by dreams of

greater and brighter tomorrows.

In accepting the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, I asked why such an

honor had been awarded to a movement which remained belea-

guered and committed to unrelenting struggle; to a movement

which was surging forward with majestic scorn for risk and danger;

to a movement which had not won the very peace and brotherhood

which were the essence of Count Alfred Nobel's great legacy.

I suggested then that the prize was not given merely as recogni-

tion of past achievement, but also as recognition, a more profound

recognition, that the nonviolent way, the American Negro's way, was

the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time:

the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without re-

sorting to violence and oppression.

In almost every press conference after my return from Oslo I was

asked, "What now? In what direction is the civil rights movement

headed?" I could not, of course, speak for the entire civil rights

movement. There were several pilots; I was but one, and the organi-

zation of which I was president, the Southern Christian Leadership

LECTURE AT UNIVERSITY OF OSLO

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 underde-

veloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. 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." Deeply etched in the

fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in

the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value,

the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. If we feel this as a profound

moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victim-

ized with starvation and ill health when we have the means to help

them. The wealthy nations must go all out to bridge the gulf between

the rich minority and the poor majority.

December 11, 1964

Conference, was, mainly, a Southern organization seeking solutions

to the peculiar problems of the South.

Pressure continued to build for SCLC to open offices in various

cities of the North. We reached a decision on this after the "Jobs

and Freedom Tour" of ten Northern cities that spring. Even though

SCLC's main base of operations remained in the South, where we

could most effectively assault the roots of racial evils, we became

involved to a much greater extent with the problems of the urban

North.

On another level, I now had to give a great deal of attention to

confront mankind: racial injustice around the world, poverty, and

war. Though each appeared to be separate and isolated, all were in-

terwoven into a single garment of man's destiny.

Whatever measure of influence I had as a result of the impor-

tance which the world attaches to the Nobel Peace Prize would have

to be used to bring the philosophy of nonviolence to all the world's

people who grapple with the age-old problem of racial injustice. I

would have to somehow convince them of the effectiveness of this

weapon that cuts without wounding, this weapon that ennobles the

man who wields it.

I found myself thinking more and more about what I consider

mankind's second great evil: the evil of poverty. This is an evil which

exists in Indiana as well as in India; in New Orleans as well as in

New Delhi.

Cannot we agree that the time has indeed come for an all-out war

on poverty—not merely in President Johnsons ''Great Society,'' hut

in every town and village of the world where this nagging evil exists?

Poverty—especially that found among thirty-five million persons in the

United States—is a tragic deficit of human will. We have, it seems, shut

the poor out of our minds and driven them from the mainstream of our

society. We have allowed the poor to become invisible, and we have

become angry when they make their presence felt. But just as nonvio-

lence has exposed the ugliness of racial injustice, we must now find ways

to expose and heal the sickness of poverty—not just its symptoms, but

its basic causes.

The third great evil confronting mankind was one about which I

was deeply concerned. It was the evil of war. At Oslo I suggested that

the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence become immediately a

subject for study and serious experimentation in every field of

human conflict, including relations between nations. This was not, I

believed, an unrealistic suggestion.

World peace through nonviolent means is neither absurd nor unat-

tainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew.

Nonviolence is a good starting point. Those of us who believe in this

method can be voices of reason, sanity, and understanding amid the

voices of violence, hatred, and emotion. We can very well set a mood of

peace out of which a system of peace can be built.

Racial injustice around the world. Poverty. War. When man solves

these three great problems he will have squared his moral progress with

his scientific progress. And, more importantly, he will have learned the

practical art of living in harmony.

The Nobel Peace Prize had given me even deeper personal faith

that man would indeed rise to the occasion and give new direction

to an age drifting rapidly to its doom.

Wherever I traveled abroad, I had been made aware that America's

integrity in all of its world endeavors was being weighed on the scales

of racial justice. This was dramatically and tragically evidenced when

that travesty of lawlessness and callousness in Meridian, Mississippi,

was headlined in Oslo on the very day of the Nobel Peace Prize

ceremonies. On the same day the civil rights movement was receiv-

ing the Nobel Peace Prize, a U.S. commissioner in Mississippi dis-

missed charges against nineteen of the men arrested by the FBI in

connection with the brutal slaying of three civil rights voter registra-

tion workers in Mississippi the previous summer. I was convinced

that the whole national conscience must be mobilized to deal with

the tragic situation of violence, terror, and blatant failure of justice

in Mississippi. We considered calling for a nationwide boycott of

Mississippi products.

Aside from the proposed boycott, however, there was a more

immediate opportunity for Congress to speak out in a way that

would remedy the root cause of Mississippi's injustices—the total

denial of the right to vote to her Negro citizens. On Monday, Janu-

ary 4, 1965, the House of Representatives had the opportunity to

challenge the seating of the entire Mississippi delegation in the

ADDRESS AT RECOGNITION DINNER IN ATLANTA

I must confess that I have enjoyed being on this mountaintop and I

am tempted to want to stay here and retreat to a more quiet and serene

life. But something within reminds me that the valley calls me in spite of

all its agonies, dangers, and frustrating moments. I must return to the

valley. Something tells me that the ultimate test of a man is not where

he stands in moments of comfort and moments of convenience, but

where he stands in moments of challenge and moments of controversy.

So I must return to the valley—a valley filled with misguided bloodthirsty

mobs, but a valley filled at the same time with little Negro boys and

girls who grow up with ominous clouds of inferiority forming in their lit-

tle mental skies; a valley filled with millions of people who, because of

economic deprivation and social isolation, have lost hope, and see life as

a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign. I must return to the val-

ley—a valley filled with literally thousands of Negroes in Alabama and

Mississippi who are brutaUzed, intimidated, and sometimes killed when

they seek to register and vote. I must return to the valley all over the

South and in the big cities of the North—a valley filled with millions of

our white and Negro brothers who are smothering in an airtight cage of

poverty in the midst of an affluent society.

January 27, 1965

I

House. Under the provisions of the Act of February 23, 1870, read-

lated that the principal condition for readmission was that all

citizens twenty-one years or older, who had resided in the state for

six months or more and who were neither convicts nor insane, be

allowed to vote freely. Mississippi had deliberately and repeatedly

ignored this solemn pact with the nation for more than fifty years

and maintained seats to which she was not entitled in an indifferent

Congress. The conscience of America, troubled by the twin Missis-

sippi tragedies of the presence of violence and the absence of law,

could have expressed itself in supporting this moral challenge to im-

moral representation.

25

MALCOLM X

honestly doubt that Malcolm had a great concern for the problems

that we face as a race. While we did not always see eye to eye on

methods to solve the race problems, I always had a deep affection for

Malcolm and felt that he had the great ability to put his finger on

the existence and root of the problem.

MARCH 26, 1964

After press conference at U.S. Senate, King has brief encounter

with Malcolm X

FEBRUARY 5, 1965

Coretta Scott King meets with Malcolm X in Selma, Alabama

FEBRUARY 21

Malcolm X is assassinated in Harlem

Imet Malcolm X once in Washington, but circumstances didn't

enable me to talk with him for more than a minute.

He is very articulate, but I totally disagree with many of his political

and philosophical views—at least insofar as I understand where he now

stands. I dont want to sound self-righteous, or absolutist, or that I

think I have the only truth, the only way. Maybe he does have some of

the answers. I know that I have often wished that he would talk less of

violence, because violence is not going to solve our problem. And, in his

Utany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any posi-

tive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our

people a great disservice. Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos,

urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as

he has done, can reap nothing but grief.

In the event of a violent revolution, we would be sorely outnum-

bered. And when it was all over, the Negro would face the same un-

changed conditions, the same squalor and deprivation—the only

difference being that his bitterness would be even more intense, his dis-

enchantment even more abject. Thus, in purely practical as well as

moral terms, the American Negro has no rational alternative to nonvio-

lence.

When they threw eggs at me in New York, I think that was really

things about my being soft, my talking about love, and they trans-

ferred that bitterness toward the white man to me. They began to

feel that I was saying to love this person that they had such a bitter

attitude toward. In fact, Malcolm X had a meeting the day before,

and he talked about me a great deal and told them that I would be

there the next night and said, "You ought to go over there and let

old King know what you think about him." And he had said a great

deal about nonviolence, criticizing nonviolence, and saying that I

approved of Negro men and women being bitten by dogs and the

firehoses. So I think this kind of response grew out of all of the talk

about my being a sort of polished Uncle Tom.

My feeling has always been that they have never understood

what I was saying. They did not see that there's a great deal of differ-

ence between nonresistance to evil and nonviolent resistance. Cer-

tainly I'm not saying that you sit down and patiently accept injustice.

I'm talking about a very strong force, where you stand up with all

your might against an evil system, and you're not a coward. You are

resisting, but you come to see that tactically as well as morally it is

better to be nonviolent. Even if one didn't want to deal with the

moral question, it would just be impractical for the Negro to talk

about making his struggle violent.

But I think one must understand that Malcolm X was a victim

of the despair that came into being as a result of a society that gives

so many Negroes the nagging sense of "nobody-ness." Just as one

condemns the philosophy, which I did constantly, one must be as

vigorous in condemning the continued existence in our society of

the conditions of racist injustice, depression, and man's inhumanity

to man.

"A product of the hate and violence"

most tragic blots to occur on the pages of the Negro's history in this

country. In many ways, however, it is typical of the misplacement of

aggressions which has occurred throughout the frustrated circum-

stances of our existence.

How often have the frustrations of second-class citizenship and

humiliating status led us into blind outrage against each other and

the real cause and course of our dilemma been ignored? It is sadly

ironic that those who so clearly pointed to the white world as the

seed of evil should now spend their energies in their own destruc-

tion.

Malcolm X came to the fore as a public figure partially as a result

title points clearly to the nature of Malcolm's life and death. He was

clearly a product of the hate and violence invested in the Negro's

blighted existence in this nation. He, like so many of our number,

was a victim of the despair that inevitably derives from the condi-

tions of oppression, poverty, and injustice which engulf the masses

of our race. But in his youth, there was no hope, no preaching,

teaching, or movements of nonviolence. He was too young for the

Garvey Movement, too poor to be a Communist—for the Commu-

nists geared their work to Negro intellectuals and labor without real-

izing that the masses of Negroes were unrelated to either—and yet

he possessed a native intelligence and drive which demanded an out-

let and means of expression. He turned first to the underworld, but

this did not fiilfill the quest for meaning which grips young minds.

It was a testimony to Malcolm's personal depth and integrity that he

could not become an underworld czar, but turned again and again

to religion for meaning and destiny. Malcolm was still turning and

growing at the time of his brutal and meaningless assassination.

I was in jail when he was in Selma, Alabama. I couldn't block his

coming, but my philosophy was so antithetical to the philosophy of

Malcolm X that I would never have invited Malcolm X to come to

Selma when we were in the midst of a nonviolent demonstration.

This says nothing about the personal respect I had for him.

During his visit to Selma, he spoke at length to my wife Coretta

about his personal struggles and expressed an interest in working

more closely with the nonviolent movement, but he was not yet able

to renounce violence and overcome the bitterness which life had

invested in him. There were also indications of an interest in politics

as a way of dealing with the problems of the Negro. All of these were

signs of a man of passion and zeal seeking a program through which

he could channel his talents.

But history would not have it so. A man who lived under the

torment of knowledge of the rape of his grandmother and murder

of his father under the conditions of the present social order, does

not readily accept that social order or seek to integrate into it. And

so Malcolm was forced to live and die as an outsider, a victim of the

violence that spawned him, and which he courted through his brief

but promising life.

The assassination of Malcolm X was an unfortunate tragedy. Let

us learn from this tragic nightmare that violence and hate only breed

violence and hate, and that Jesus' word still goes out to every po-

tential Peter, "Put up thy sword." Certainly we will continue to

disagree, but we must disagree without becoming violently disagree-

able. We will still suffer the temptation to bitterness, but we must

learn that hate is too great a burden to bear for a people moving on

toward their date with destiny.

The American Negro cannot afford to destroy its leadership.

Men of talent are too scarce to be destroyed by envy, greed, and

tribal rivalry before they reach their full maturity. Like the murder

of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, the murder of Malcolm X de-

prived the world of a potentially great leader. I could not agree with

either of these men, but I could see in them a capacity for leadership

which I could respect and which was only beginning to mature in

judgment and statesmanship.

I think it is even more unfortunate that this great tragedy

occurred at a time when Malcolm X was reevaluating his own philo-

sophical presuppositions and moving toward a greater understand-

ing of the nonviolent movement and toward more tolerance of white

people generally.

I think there is a lesson that we can all learn from this: that

violence is impractical and that now, more than ever before, we must

pursue the course of nonviolence to achieve a reign of justice and a

rule of love in our society, and that hatred and violence must be cast

into the unending limbo if we are to survive.

In a real sense, the growth of black nationalism was symptomatic

of the deeper unrest, discontent, and frustration of many Negroes

because of the continued existence of racial discrimination. Black

nationalism was a way out of that dilemma. It was based on an unre-

ahstic and sectional perspective that I condemned both pubHcly and

privately. It substituted the tyranny of black supremacy for the tyr-

anny of white supremacy. I always contended that we as a race must

not seek to rise from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage,

but to create a moral balance in society where democracy and broth-