1/20/21, positiveexperience.org/blog
“For those who are telling me to keep my mouth shut, I can’t do that…I’m not going to segregate my moral concerns. And we must know on some positions, cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’ And there’re times when you must take a stand that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but you must do it because it is right.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
May 10, 1967
In the speech from which the above excerpt was taken (full speech published here), Dr. King began by laying out three evils he sought to address: “the evil of racism, the evil of poverty, and the evil of war.” These three evils were, and are, interconnected; though Dr. King is an iconic figure of civil rights and non-violent direct action, he also saw the fight for racial justice as inseparable from movements for economic justice. He worked to rid society of excessive capitalism, racism, and militarism in order to center the dignity of everyone, regardless of race or class. And though we may now honor Dr. King, as the excerpt above alludes to, his views made him an unpopular figure in the years leading up to his assassination. In 1966, a Gallup poll found that nearly 2/3 of Americans disapproved of Dr. King. After the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 74% of Americans were convinced that such mass demonstrations were detrimental to achieving racial justice. From 1963 up to the end of his young life, the FBI heavily surveilled Dr. King, seeking to discredit both the man and his work.
Photo: Howard Sochurek/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
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