Martin Luther King Jr. on 'the other America'

Editor’s note: To commemorate Juneteenth, we share excerpts of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at Stanford University in April 1967. We hear in this speech many of the themes that would animate King’s career but are too often forgotten: Economic equality and justice, the historical context of white backlash, and optimism as an ethos. The speech has been edited for length.

I’d like to use as a subject from which to speak this afternoon, the other America. And I use this subject because there are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful for our situation. And in a sense, this America is overflowing with the miracle of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies and culture and education for their minds, and freedom and human dignity for their spirit. In this America, millions of people experience every day the opportunity of having life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in all of their dimensions. And in this America, millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity.

But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America, millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America, millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America, people are poor by the millions. And they find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty, in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

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The struggle for our civil rights and the struggle to make these two Americas one America is much more difficult today than it was five, 10 years ago… We’ve fought across the South, in various struggles to get rid of legal, overt segregation and all of the humiliation that surrounded that system of segregation. In a sense, this was a struggle for decency. We could not go to a lunch counter and get a hamburger or a cup of coffee. We could not make use of public accommodations. Public transportation was segregated, and often we had to sit in the back. In transportation within cities, we often had to stand over empty seats because sections were reserved for whites only. We did not have the right to vote, in so many areas of the South.

…By the thousands, we protested these conditions. We made it clear that it was ultimately more honorable to accept jail cell experiences than the accept segregation and humiliation. By the thousands, students and adults decided to sit in at segregated lunch counters, to protest conditions there. And when they were sitting at those lunch hours, they were, in reality, standing up for the best in the American dream and seeking to take the whole nation back to those great wells of democracy, which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

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But we must see that the struggle today is much more difficult. It’s more difficult today because we are struggling now for genuine equality, and it’s much easier to integrate a lunch counter than it is to guarantee a livable income and a good, solid job. It’s much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee the right to live in sanitary, decent housing conditions. It is much easier to integrate a public park than it is to make genuine quality integrated education a reality.

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It’s something that is often overlooked, but Negros generally live in worse slums today than 20 or 25 years ago. In the North, schools are more segregated today than they were in 1954, when the Supreme Court’s decision on desegregation was rendered. Economically, the Negro is worse off today than he was 15 and 20 years ago. And so the unemployment rate among whites, at one time, was about the same as the unemployment rate among Negros. But today, the unemployment rate among Negros is twice that of whites. And the average income of the Negro is today 50% less than whites.

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Now the other thing that we’ve got to come to see now, that many others didn’t see too well during the last 10 years, and that is that racism is still alive in American society, and much more widespread than we realize. And we must see racism for what it is. It is a myth of the superior and the inferior race. It is the false and tragic notion that one particular group, one particular race, is responsible for all of the progress, all of the insights in the total flow of history. And the theory that another group or another race is totally depraved, innately impure, and innately inferior. In the final analysis, racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide.

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This leads me to say something about another discussion that we hit a great deal, and that is the so-called white backlash. I would like to honestly say to you that the white backlash is merely a new name for an old phenomenon. It’s not something that just came into being because shouts of Black power or because Negros engaged in riots in Watts, for instance. The fact is that the state of California voted a fair housing bill out of existence before anybody shouted Black power or before anybody rioted in Watts. It may well be that shouts of Black power and riots in Watts and the Harlems and the other areas are the consequences of the white backlash, rather than the cause of them.

What it is necessary to see is that there has never been a single, solid, monistic, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans on the whole question of civil rights and on the whole question of racial equality. This is something that truth impels all men of goodwill to admit.

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Our nation has constantly taken a positive step forward on the question of racial justice and racial equality. But over and over again, at the same time, it made certain backwards steps. And this has been the persistence of the so-called white backlash.

In 1863, the Negro was freed from the bondage of physical slavery. But at the same time, the nation refused to give him land to make that freedom meaningful.

And at that same period, America was giving millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that America was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic flower that would make it possible to grow and develop, and refused to give that economic flower to its Black peasants.

And this is why Frederick Douglass could say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger, freedom to the winds and rains of heaven, freedom without roofs to cover their heads. He went on to say that it was freedom without bread to eat, freedom without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time.

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Here’s another notion that gets out. It’s around everywhere. It’s in the South, it’s in the North, it’s in California and all over our nation. It’s the notion that legislation can’t solve the problem, it can’t do anything in this area. And those who project this argument, contend that you’ve got to change the heart, and that you can’t change the heart through legislation.

Now, I’ll be the first one to say that there is real need for a lot of heart changing in our country. And I believe in changing the heart. I preach about it. I believe in the need for conversion, in many instances, and regeneration, to use theological terms. And I would be the first to say that if the race problem in America is to be solved, the white person must treat the Negro right, not merely because the law says it, but because it’s natural. Because it’s right. And because the Negro is his brother.

And so I realize that if we are to have a truly integrated society, men and women will have to rise to the majestic heights of being obedient to the unenforceable.

But after saying this, let me say another thing: Although it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. Even though it may be true that the law cannot change the heart, it can restrain the harvest. Even though it may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.

And so while the law may not change the hearts of men, it can and it does change the habits of men. And when you begin to change the habits of men, pretty soon the attitudes will be changed. Pretty soon, the hearts will be changed. I am convinced that we still need strong civil rights legislation. And there’s a bill before Congress right now to have a national, federal open housing bill. A federal law declaring discrimination in housing unconstitutional. And also a bill to make the administration of justice real, all over our country.

Now, nobody can doubt the need for this. Nobody can doubt the need, if he thinks about the fact that since 1963, some 58 Negros and white civil rights workers have been brutally murdered in the state of Mississippi alone, and not a single person has been convicted for these dastardly crimes.

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The Negro came to this country involuntarily, in chains, while others came voluntarily… No other racial group has been a slave on American soil. The society placed a stigma on the color of the Negro, on the color of his skin. Because he was Black, doors were closed to him that would not close to other groups. And need to say to people that you are to lift yourself by your own bootstraps, but it is to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

And the fact is that millions of Negros, as a result of centuries of denial and neglect, have been left bootless. And they find themselves impoverished aliens in this affluent society. And there is a great deal that the society can and must do, if the Negro is to gain the economic security that he needs.

Now, one of the answers, it seems to me, is a guaranteed annual income, a guaranteed minimum income for all people and for all families of our country. It seems to me that the civil rights movement must now begin to organize for the guaranteed annual income, begin to organize people all over our country and mobilize forces, so that we can bring to the attention of our nation, this need and this something which I believe will go a long, long way toward dealing with the Negro’s economic problem and the economic problem with many other poor people confronting our nation.

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Now, let me say, finally, that we have difficult days ahead. But I haven’t despair. Somehow, I maintain hope in spite of hope, and I’ve talked about the difficulties and how hard the problems will be, as we tackle them.

But I want to close by saying this afternoon that I still have faith in the future. And I still believe that these problems can be solved. And so I will not join anyone who will say that we still can’t develop a coalition of conscience. I realize and understand the discontent and the agony and the disappointment, and even the bitterness of those who feel that whites in America cannot be trusted. And I would be the first to say that there are all too many who are still guided by the racist ethos.

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I say that if the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face, including the so-called white backlash, will surely fail. We’re going to win our freedom.

Because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands.

And so I can still sing we shall overcome. We shall overcome because somehow the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

We shall overcome because Carlisle is right. No lie can live forever. We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right. Truth crushed to earth will rise again. We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right. Truth forever on the scaffold wronged, forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future.

With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope, this faith. We will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nations into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

With this faith, we will be able to speed up the day when all of God’s children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and live together as brothers and sisters, all over this great nation. That will be a great day. That will be a great tomorrow. In the word sure to speak symbolically, that will be the day when the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy.

Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com. Follow Minnesota Reformer on Facebook and X.