"And we are criminals in that war. We have committed more war crimes almost than any other nation in the world and we won't stop because of our piide, our arrogance as a nation"
"the triple evils that are interrelated": "racism, economic exploitation, and war"? "A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years," Kind told the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) in 1967, "will 'thingify' them --- make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together"
The U.S. "approach[ed] spiritual death" when it spent billions of dollars feeding its costly, cancerous military industrial complex" while masses of its children lived in poverty in its outwardly prosperous cities.
Americans should follow Jesus in being "maladjusted" and "divine[ly] dissatisfied...until the the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.... until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history and every family is living in a decent home...[and] men will recognize that out of one blod God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth"?
"the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people," King elaborated for his colleagues. "And one day we must ask the question, 'Why are there forty million poor people in America?' And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question you begin to question the capitalistic economy."
"We are called upon," King told his fellow civil rights activists, ''to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day," he argued, "we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that [radical] questions must be raised.....'Who owns the oil'...'Who owns the iron ore?'...'Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water?'
King argued that "the roots" of the economic injustice he sought to overcome "are in the [capitalist] system rather in men or faulty operations"
"A voice out of Bethlehem two thousand years ago said that all men are equal....Jesus of Nazareth wrote no books; he owned no property to endow him with influence. He had no friends in the courts of the powerful. But he changed the course of mankind with only the poor and the despised."
"Naive and unsophisticated though we may be," King said, "the poor and despised of the twentieth century will revolutionize this era. In our 'arrogance, lawlessness, and ingratitude,' we will fight for human justice, brotherhood, secure peace, and abundance for all"
http://www.hpol.org/record.asp?id=85
"The Good Samaritan or 'If I had sneezed...'", Martin Luther King, Jr Date: 16-01-1968
http://www.hpol.org/record.asp?id=84
"I am a drum major for justice" Martin Luther King, Jr
http://www.hpol.org/record.asp?id=86
Sermon explaining his start in the movement for civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr
http://www.hpol.org/record.php?id=150
Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam Martin Luther King, Jr Date: 16-04-1967
And finally,
I have a dream by Martin Luther King Jr.
http://www.hpol.org/record.asp?id=72
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