(The Dallas Examiner) – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is known throughout the United States and the world for his speeches and sermons. However there are some that are more timeless than others. And while we have made important progress as a nation, many of Black America’s tribulations remain the same. Perhaps it is for this reason that once or twice a year, America has reviewed the profound words that King shared with the U.S. more than 50 years ago.

One such message he shared was The Three Evils of Society during the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, Aug. 16, 1967.

As King began to speak, he acknowledged that the crowd was full of individuals from diverse backgrounds with a common goal.

“We have come here from the dusty plantations of the Deep South and the depressing ghettos of the North,” King acknowledged. “We have come from the great universities and the flourishing suburbs. We have come from Appalachian poverty and from conscious stricken wealth. But we have come.”

King said that they were gathered because they shared a common concern for the moral health of the country.

“Like the prophets of old, we have read the handwriting on the wall. We have seen our nation weighed in the balance of history and found wanting. We have come because we see this as a dark hour in the affairs of men,” King said.

Shattered dreams

He said that as the marchers of Mississippi, Selma and Washington who staked their lives on the American dream during the first half of the decade, could not stand by idly and watch the country be contaminated by the 18th century policies of Goldwaterism. And that they were dreamers of a dream that the dark past of inhumanity would be transformed into a brighter day of justice in the near future. As idealist, he said it was hard to let the dream go, but at the same time, it was hard to escape the delusion and betrayal. The hopes of the country had been blasted and its dreams have been shattered.

“The promise of a Great Society was shipwrecked off the coast of Asia, on the dreadful peninsula of Vietnam. The poor, Black and White, are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity,” King said. “What happens to a dream deferred? It leads to bewildering frustration and corroding bitterness. I came to see this in a personal experience here in Chicago last summer. In all the speaking I have done in the United States before varied audiences, including some hostile Whites, the only time I have ever been booed was one night in our regular weekly mass meetings by some angry young men of our movement.”

The boos affected him negatively. At first he couldn’t understand why they would boo someone who worked so hard and made so many sacrifices of the past 12 years, he confessed. Later, it occurred to him that the boos may have come from a group of Black people overwhelmed with frustration and hostility that stemmed from unfulfilled promises of progress and freedom.

He then thought about all of the sermons and lectures he had made about his dream, the not-so-distant future of justice and equality, urging them to have faith in America and White society. He acknowledged that, with each promise their dreams soared with hope, but then crashed into an infuriating nightmare as their communities continued to be swept with oppression and poverty.

There was a rising global demand for freedom and equality, King said as he criticized the disparity in government priorities, with significant funds allocated for military purposes while meager resources are directed toward addressing poverty and international development.

Bipartisan injustice

He said that Congress would rather spend money on war than foreign aid. They would rather create a very partisan anti-right bill rather than help resolve poverty. Even a small budget for rat control was met with inaction.

“And I submit to you tonight, that a Congress that proves to be more anti-negro than anti-rat needs to be dismissed,” King said.

“It seems that our legislative assemblies have adopted Nero as their patron saint and are bent on fiddling while our cities burn. Even when the people persist and in the face of great obstacles, develop indigenous leadership and self-help approaches to their problems and finally tread the forest of bureaucracy to obtain existing government funds, the corrupt political order seeks to crush even this beginning of hope.”

King talked about a program in Chicago approved by the Department of Adult Education, in which the Southern Christian Leadership Conference started an adult literacy program. The program taught literary skills to 1,000 young adults to prepare them for the workforce.

A&P stores hired over 500 students the first week and had agreed to hire 750 students through the SCLC program and Operation Breadbasket. At that point, he said Congressmen Eddie Day Paccinski of Pennsylvania and the Daley machine – referring to a coalition led by Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley – interrupted the program and demanded that Washington channel the funds through the coalition-run poverty program. It wouldn’t be long before the program and the funding was discontinued.

King stated such a case in Mississippi and many others were common throughout the country.

“The crowning achievement in hypocrisy must go to those staunch Republicans and Democrats of the Midwest and West who were given land by our government when they came here as immigrants from Europe. They were given education through the land grant colleges. They were provided with agricultural agents to keep them abreast of forming trends, they were granted low interest loans to aid in the mechanization of their farms and now that they have succeeded in becoming successful, they are paid not to farm and these are the same people that now say to Black people, whose ancestors were brought to this country in chains and who were emancipated in 1863 without being given land to cultivate or bread to eat; that they must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. What they truly advocate is Socialism for the rich and Capitalism for the poor.”

King said that he wished those dark days were just a passing phase in the nation’s lifecycle. Instead, what they were witnessing was a three-prong sickness that has been lurking within the nations “body politic” from the beginning. The sickness, he declared to be racism, excessive materialism and militarism.

Racism

Racism was foremost on the list and seemed to be a systemic portion of the other two prongs of sickness.

As early as 1906, W.E.B. Du Bois prophesied that the problem of the 20th century would be the color line, according to King, who described America as having a schizophrenic personality when it came to race. King stated that America likes the principles, though not the practices, of antiracism, equality and justice. And that that type of duality has caused America to take a step backwards with every step forward that it has taken toward racial justness.

“If America does not respond creatively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say, that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men.”

Materialism

King felt that the second illness was described well by an Asian writer.

“You call your thousand material devices labor saving machinery, yet you are forever busy,” King quoted. “With the multiplying of your machinery, you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have you want more and wherever you are you want to go somewhere else. Your devices are neither time saving nor soul saving machinery. They are so many sharp spurs, which urge you on to invent more machinery and to do more business.”

King said that he didn’t mean for us to turn back the clocks on scientific progress. But the country must not let materialism overshadow morality. Otherwise, we end up with “guided missiles and misguided men.” He said, despite the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of hard work and sacrifice, it was actually built on the exploitation and suffering of Black slaves and continues to flourish on the exploitation of the poor.

Until each person is ensured a fair wage and a share of government services and natural resources, there will always be people living in poverty. It is inexcusable to have people remain unemployed in a country that has more than enough resources, according to King who questioned if America’s materialistic culture allowed them to share with underserved communities what was necessary to end poverty.

He said Victor Hugo, a writer and politician of the 1800s must’ve been thinking of the 20th century America when he wrote, “There’s always more misery among the lower classes then there is humanity in the higher classes.”

King said most of that materialism and humanity should be devoted toward children’s education and health, rather than our impressive automobiles and beautiful buildings.

Militarism

The last prong of sickness, according to King, was the disease of militarism. He said nothing in a nation has – at that time – demonstrated the nations abuse of military power then the war in Vietnam. He said a tour of the Geneva agreement, impair the nation, exacerbated the hatred between continents and even worse races, and it exposed the whole world to the risk of nuclear warfare.

He described America as an arrogant country professing to be concerned about the freedom of four nations, while we have yet to settle order in our own house. He said American senators and congressmen voted to appropriate billions of dollars for the War in Vietnam, but the same senators and congressman were against a fair housing bill to make it possible for the same Negroes that fought in Vietnam to purchase a decent home. They pay to arm Black soldiers to kill on foreign battlefields, though offer little protection for the relatives who have been beaten and killed on their own land in Southern American states. America was more willing to make a Negro 100% citizen to fight in war but reduce him to 50% citizen once he was back on American soil.

King offered one thing that would allow the Black community opportunities to overcome these three prongs of sickness. That was voting. He said if the Black community had an opportunity to vote, they would have a voice in detaching themselves from the illnesses. King has often described voting as an opportunity to put an office to those who would fight for freedom and justice for all Americans, not just a specific group.

Hope in the evolution of the nation

“So we are here because we believe, we hope, we pray that something new might emerge in the political life of this nation, which will produce a new man, new structures and institutions and a new life for mankind. I am convinced that this new life will not emerge until our nation undergoes a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people the giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.”

King said a true evolution of values will cause us to look back on history and question the fairness and justice of its policies as well as the policies and practices of today. It’ll make us look at how automation has displaced employees while employers remain intact and will say this is not just. A true revolution of values will make us look uneasy at the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. It’ll make us look across the ocean and see how capitalism is always a concern for the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America and say this is not just.

“A true revelation of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, this way of settling differences is not just” King demanded, as he talked about how the torturous death, nations spoiling their homes, women and children being turned into widows and orphans, sending traumatized soldiers back home physically and/or psychologically disabled, could not be reconciled with wisdom, justice or love.

“May I say in conclusion that there is a need now, more than ever before, for men and women in our nation to be creatively maladjusted…,” King said in closing.

“I want to say to you tonight that I intend to keep these issues mixed because they are mixed. Somewhere we must see that justice is indivisible, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and I have fought too long and too hard against segregated public accommodations to end up at this point in my life, segregating my moral concerns.

“So let us stand in this convention knowing that 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 conscious asks the question, is it right? And on some positions, it is necessary for the moral individual to take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic nor popular; but he must do it because it is right. And we say to our nation tonight, we say to our government, we even say to our FBI, we will not be harassed, we will not make a butchery of our conscience, we will not be intimidated, and we will be heard.”