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| Icon by Tobias Haller |
"In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington to see if the will
is still alive or if it is alive in this nation. We are coming to
Washington in a Poor People’s Campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the
tired, the poor, the huddled masses. We are going to bring those who
have known long years of hurt and neglect. We are going to bring those
who have come to feel that life is a long and desolate corridor with no
exit signs. We are going to bring children and adults and old people,
people who have never seen a doctor or a dentist in their lives.
We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not
coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the
government address itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day,
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of
Happiness." But if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither
life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He
merely exists.
We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note
that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic
nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and
fulfillment; to make the invisible visible.
(Sermon by Martin Luther King, Jr at the National Cathedral, Washington, DC, on 31 March 1968. The Rev King was shot on April 4, 1968.)
Tobias Haller blogs at In a Godward Direction.
