Transcript
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Upon the recommendation of the Black Concerns Council, the seminary has established now an annual lectureship in honor and in the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Tonight, we inaugurate this lecture series. Our guest lecturer is Dr. James H. Cohn, the Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Dr. Cohn is obviously well known on this campus. Your presence tonight attests to that fact. He received
his Bachelor of Divinity degree from Garrett Theological Seminary, his Master of Arts, and Doctor of Philosophy from Northwestern University. Professor Cohn is an ordained minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His research and teaching are in Christian theology generally, with special attention to black theology and the theologies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as 20th century European American theological thought. Dr. Paris pointed out over supper this evening that it was 30 years ago this
year that Dr. Cohn first published that groundbreaking volume entitled Black Theology and Black Power. Since then, he has followed it up with Black Theology, A Documentary History, Volume 1 from 1966 to 1979, and Volume 2, 1980 to 1992. Most recently, he has published Martin and Malcolm and America, A Dream or a Nightmare. His lecture tonight is entitled Martin and Malcolm on Violence and Nonviolence. Please join me in welcoming to Princeton Seminary Dr. James H. Cohn. Thank
you very much for your enthusiastic welcome to Dr. Gillespie and to the faculty and to the students and members of the Princeton community. Today, I am deeply honored to be with you tonight on this distinguished occasion. When Professor Peter Parrish, my friend, called me in November last year, and invited me to be the inaugural lecturer for this newly established Martin Luther King Jr. Lectureship, I tried to decline, and largely due for the lack of time to
prepare for an adequate presentation for such an occasion as this. Five months is a short time when one is teaching and advising doctoral students, but Peter is an old friend, and he has a way of pressuring me, and I told him I'd do it any other time, next time, any time in the future, but he wouldn't accept no for an answer, so watch out for your friends. Also, I'm so pleased to be here because I know
so many people here. Even on your faculty, people who have been in my classes at Union Seminary, so it's a wonderful time to be able to come here, and there are many students here who were here, who are now at Union Seminary, working there, so this is a special time for me to greet friends and to meet new ones. So tonight, we will have a conversation on Martin and Malcolm on nonviolence and violence. No issue has
been more hotly debated in the African American community than violence and nonviolence. No two persons symbolize this debate more than Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. They represented two radically different responses to nonviolence and violence in the black freedom movement during the 1960s. Their perspectives are still discussed and debated today, but seldom understood. Martin King's followers frequently misrepresent Malcolm X's views, referring to him as a messiah of hate and a black Klu Klux Klan of
racial extremists. Malcolm X's followers distort Martin King's views, often calling him a 20th century religious uncotam pacifist, the best weapon of whites who want to brutalize black people. Any view can be discredited by simplifying it to a level of a caricature. In this lecture tonight, I will present a brief analysis of Martin and Malcolm's views on nonviolence and violence, beginning with Martin's view because Malcolm's perspective was largely developed as a critical response to the white and
black media's presentation of Martin King's views as normative for the African American community. Martin Luther King Jr. was a pastor and a civil rights leader and is arguably not only America's most distinguished theologian, but also the most influential American in the 20th century. He was named Times Man of the Year in 1963 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. He is the only American with a national holiday in his name alone. With the support of
many ordinary people in the black freedom movement, King's practice and thought radically transformed America's understanding of itself and inspired liberation movements around the world. One can hardly go anywhere and not encounter his moral influence. Martin King is best known as America's pre-eminent advocate of nonviolence. From the time of the year-long triumphant Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and '56, to his tragic assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, April 4, '68, Martin King embraced nonviolence absolutely. For King,
nonviolence was not only an effective strategy of social change, it was the heart of his philosophy of life. There was no limit to his efficacy of nonviolence in conflict situations. He contended that nonviolence was the most potent weapon for both blacks in the U.S. civil rights movement and for other oppressed people struggling for justice throughout the world. Nonviolence was not only the best tool he contended for solving conflicts within nations, it could, he contended, resolve
differences between nations. For King, the acquisition of nuclear weapons by several nations created the situation in which the choice is no longer between nonviolence and violence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. The roots of Martin King's journey to nonviolence lie in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was born, January 15, 1929, as the son of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., who was the pastor of the prestigious Ebeneezer Baptist Church. Young Martin was nurtured in the black Baptist
tradition of the Christian faith. He followed his father into the ordained ministry in his late teens. The Christian idea of love, as expressed in Jesus's sermon on the mount, and his sacrificial death on the cross was the hallmark of the black religious experience that shaped King's perspective. He combined the Christian, combined Christian love with the accommodative and protest philosophies of Booker T. Washington and the NAACP. Together, these ideas provided the religious and political resources for King
to develop a militant, nonviolent philosophy of social change in the context of the black struggle for racial justice in America. The development of King's philosophy of nonviolence was a gradual process. Initially, his unpleasant childhood experiences with racial segregation had a profoundly negative effect on his attitude toward whites. He was introduced to racial prejudice at the early age of five when the father of his white friend told young Martin that his son could no longer play with
him because he was colored. This and other encounters with white prejudice shook young Martin deeply and thereby made it difficult to love whites as he was taught at home and at church. At one point during his early years, King was determined to hate all whites. Martin King's negative attitude toward whites started to change through the influence of religion, education, and personal encounters with moderate whites in an intercollegiate organization and later at Crozier Seminary and Boston University
School of Theology. At Morehouse College, he read Henry David Thoreau's essay on civil disobedience and was introduced to a wide range of political and religious philosophies that supported the integration of Negroes into the mainstream of American society. In graduate school, King not only met liberal whites as teachers and fellow students, he also encountered progressive theological and philosophical ideas that reinforced his belief about justice and love, integration, and the beloved community. He read books and essays about
and by Mahatma Gandhi, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Reinhold Niebuhr at Crozier. At Boston, under the tutelage of Edgar Sheffield Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf, King acquired a sophisticated knowledge of personalism, a philosophy that accented the infinite value of the human person. A year prior to his completion of his doctoral studies, Martin King accepted the call to become the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, a middle-class church whose membership included many professors and administrators
at Alabama State University. When Rosa Parks was arrested December 1, 1955, because she refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, the black community was enraged. In protest, they initiated a boycott of the city buses December 5 and asked King to be their leader. Martin King was not committed to non-violence at the beginning of the bus protests. As white violence became increasingly focused on King personally through police harassment, the bombing of his
house, volumes of hate mail, and a frequent telephone threats of harm, King, seeking to protect his family and himself from white violence, applied for a gun permit, which of course was rejected. The threat of violence was so real that arm blacks took turns guarding King's home. King also kept a loaded gun in his house, which Bennett Rustin of the War Resisters League nearly sat on during a visit. The most important factor that influenced King to reject
self-defense and adopt non-violence was his personal appropriation of the faith of his parents and the black church. The decisive moment occurred a few weeks after the inauguration of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, January 27, 1956. He received a nasty telephone call about midnight. Listen, n*****, we've taken all we want from you. Before next week, you'll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery, unquote. Though King was accustomed to receive in about 40 threats like that daily,
yet for some reason, that one stunned him, preventing him from going back to sleep. Martin began to realize, as he often spoke about later in his sermons, that his wife and newly born baby daughter could be taken from him or he from them at any moment. He got up out of the bed, went to the kitchen to heat some coffee, hoping that it would provide a little relief. None came. He reflected back on the theologies and
the philosophies that he had studied in graduate school, searching for a way to cope with the problem of evil and suffering, but they provided no help in his moment of distress. He was ready to give up and try to think of a way to remove himself from the leadership of the boycott without looking like a coward. Exhausted, he had lost his courage. King decided to take his problem to the God his parents told him about, the
one they and other black Christians said could make a way out of no way. With his head in his hand, he said, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed. I'm here taking a stand for what I believe is right, but now I'm afraid the people are looking to me for leadership and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've
come to the point where I can't face it alone, unquote. It was in the midst of this crisis of faith that Martin King felt an inner voice saying to him, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth, and lo, I will be with you always. After that revelatory experience, King said, I was ready to face anything. Three nights later, King's house was bombed and people were amazed how calm he was. After finding
out that his wife and baby were safe, he walked out on his porch to face an angry black crowd with weapons of violence, guns, and sticks ready to return an eye for an eye. Don't let us get panicky, King said. He pleaded with them to get rid of their weapons because he said we can't solve this problem with retaliatory violence. On the contrary, he said, we must meet violence with non-violence and turn into the most
persuasive authority in the black Christian experience. King reminded blacks of the words of Jesus love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you. We must, he said, love our white brothers no matter what they do to us, unquote. These are difficult words for any person or community, especially for an oppressed black community which has lived under the psychological and physical brutalities of white supremacy for nearly four centuries. Black people get
tired of turning the other cheek in the face of white brutality, but Montgomery blacks accepted King's appeal, went home because he connected it with their belief that there is a divine power in the world greater than the forces of white supremacy. It is one thing to love individual whites personally and quite another to use love as a political instrument of social change. It was Gandhi who provided King with the philosophical and political insight of non-violent
direct action with a deeper knowledge of Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence and how he had applied it in South Africa and India. King became a firm believer and an astute defender of non-violence. Jesus defined the center of King's religious understanding of love and Gandhi showed him how to use love as an instrument to transform society. King's commitment to non-violence was also informed by his knowledge of liberal Protestant theology and the philosophy of personalism, both
of which emphasize the oneness and infinite value of humanity. King combined these resources with black faith and Gandhi and from the three of these sources created a distinctive and persuasive perspective on non-violence. Martin King not only preached non-violence during Montgomery bus boycott, he founded a national organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in order to demonstrate the power of non-violence to achieve justice in every segment of American life. The officers were mostly ministers and
its motto was to redeem the soul of America. For King, love was the most powerful force in the world and non-violence was love expressed politically. Because non-violence was widely thought of by many people as doing nothing, King repeatedly emphasized the active dimensions of non-violence. It was only passive in the sense of refusing to inflict physical harm on others. Non-violence, therefore, was not a method for cowards, he said, people afraid to suffer for
the cause of justice. Non-violence resists evil, but it refuses to commit evil. Even the enemy is a person and must be treated as such. The non-violent activist does not insult or seek to destroy the opponent, but rather seeks to make the enemy a friend. However, even if non-violence fails to convert the enemy to a friend, it eliminates hate in the hearts of those who are committed to it. Non-violence bestows courage and
self-respect to oppressed people who were consumed by fear and low self-esteem. King believed that the only, King believed that only moral means could achieve moral ends, because the end is pre-existent in the means. Violence, therefore, was both impractical and immoral for King. As a 10% minority in the richest and the most powerful nation in the world, it was ludicrous to think that blacks could achieve freedom through violence for King. Even though most blacks
were not morally committed to violence, non-violence, King persuaded them to adopt it as the best strategy for achieving justice. The practical arguments of non-violence were for those who could not accept it morally. From the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 to the Selma march in 1965, King inspired African Americans to hold firmly to non-violence in their struggle for justice. The success of the student sit-ins, the freedom rise, the Birmingham demonstrations, and the march
on Washington provided King with the opportunity to demonstrate the power of non-violence in destroying legal segregation in American life. The triumphant march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 was the climax of the first phase of the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Act of '64 and the Voting Rights Bill of '65 were its major political achievements. It was much easier to advocate non-violence when there were concrete victories and few serious challenges to its advocacy.
Malcolm X was the most effective critic of King and non-violence, but he was a marginal figure in the Southern Bay civil rights movement. After the Watts riot, however, in Los Angeles in 1965 and the rise of black power in June of '66, King's views on non-violence were seriously challenged by young movement activists who became disillusioned with the relevance of non-violence in bestowing self-esteem and eliminating poverty in the black community of the urban
ghettos of the North. They turned to Malcolm X's black nationalist self-defense philosophy as an alternative to King. Martin King, therefore, was forced to defend non-violence among critics who were captivated by the legacy of Malcolm X as powerfully expressed in the rise of black power. King met his critics head on and challenged them to prove that black power was more effective than non-violence in achieving real results. Though many black militants rejected King's views on
non-violence and integration, they admired his courage and respected his commitment principles. Martin King's stature in the white community continued to increase as long as he persuaded blacks to hold firmly to non-violence, but they rejected him when he applied his views to America as a nation. King's opposition to America's war in Vietnam won him few friends in government and in the society at large. Most whites acknowledge King as an expert on civil rights as long
as he urged blacks to be non-violent in their struggle for justice. They told King to stick to civil rights and leave peace issues between nations to the elected politicians and their advisors. The idea that a black preacher's views on America's foreign policy should be taken seriously was ludicrous to most whites, especially to Lyndon Johnson, who saw himself as the best friend of the Negro in government. What right did King have to criticize America and its
president when they have done so much for the Negro? Between '66 and '68, King struggled against an American public who resisted further advances in civil rights and resented his claim that America was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. King's political optimism in the early phase of the civil rights movement was transformed into a tough religious hope derived from his deep belief that unearned is redemptive. King's faith in non-violence was first and foremost
an unshakable religious commitment. Although he preached the strategic value of non-violence, yet the essence of King's belief was his acceptance of it as a way of life because of the sheer morality of its claim. Thus, even in defeat, non-violence still wins. This is so because the universe is moving toward justice. No person or nation can prevent its ultimate realization. This faith sustained the later King in his struggle to achieve economic justice for garbage workers
in Memphis as he was preparing for the Poor People's Campaign to pressure the federal government to withdraw from the war in Vietnam and to intensify instead the war on poverty. An assassin's bullet ended King's life while he was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, but his hope still lives on in those who today fight for justice. But when we turn to Malcolm X, get ready now. Now I know you can deal with
the first part, but let's go to the other part here now. And this is the part you really should hear more than the first part. I put myself in the first part, but that's that that's that I know you can handle. It might cause you to move a little bit, but it is this part that's coming up with Malcolm X that you may not hear much about out here. When we turn to Malcolm X, we hear
a different voice from that of Martin King, one that whites and some blacks found most disturbing to their religious and political sensibilities. Malcolm X was a Muslim minister and a black nationalist leader and the most formidable race critic in American history. More effectively than anyone else, he exposed the racist hypocrisy of American democracy and the ethical contradictions of Christianity. His unrelenting and uncompromising critique of America and Christianity was bold and devastating. Few people could listen to
him and not be challenged by the cogency of his analysis. Malcolm focused his criticism on the failure of white people to treat black people as human beings. That and that alone was the heart of his critique. There was nothing fancy or sophisticated about it, just plain talk, telling the truth about the crimes against blacks that whites didn't want to hear about and few blacks had the courage to confront. Whites enslaved blacks for 244 years, segregated them
for another 100, and lynched them all along the way. Whenever and wherever whites had a mind to demonstrate their absolute power over blacks, how could American whites exclude blacks and other people of color from the political process and yet say this nation is the land of the free? How could white Christians treat blacks as brutes and still claim love as their central religious principle? With rage, humor, and devastating logic, Malcolm had a field day exposing these
political and religious contradictions. Malcolm's articulation of the gap between the American creed and deed angered many whites because he spoke forcefully and bluntly, refusing to sugarcoat the truth about the crimes that whites have committed against blacks. He not only spoke out passionately against the brutality and the cowardice of the Klu Klux Klan, but also he spoke out against the structural and hidden violence of the American government. Stop talking about Mississippi, he railed. America is Mississippi. To
understand Malcolm's perspective on violence, therefore, it is necessary to view it within the religious and the political context of America's nearly 400 years of racist violence against blacks and his white Christian justification and tolerance. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, May 19, 1925, Malcolm lived when America was defined by overt racist violence. Segregation was the law of the land, the Klu Klux Klan was marching, lynching was commonplace, and the government, educational institutions, and the churches routinely practiced and
openly taught that blacks were inferior mentally and physically. No black person could escape the physical and the psychological violence of white supremacy. Malcolm's father, Earl Little, the Baptist preacher and a follower of Marcus Garvey's black nationalist philosophy was a special target of white hate groups. While Malcolm was still in his mother's womb, the KKK paid the Little family a visit and forced their move from Omaha to Lansing, Michigan, where at the age of four, Malcolm witnessed
the burning down of his home by a white hate group called the Black Legionnaires. Malcolm called that event the Nightmare Night in 1929. Two years later, Malcolm claimed that the same group killed his father, leaving the family fatherless and soon penniless. Unable to cope, Malcolm's mother, Louise Little, had a mental breakdown and was hospitalized in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The Little children were placed in foster homes after Malcolm's eighth grade teacher told him that a lawyer was no
realistic goal for a n*****. He became disillusioned. Despite being at the top of his class, he dropped out of school and went to Boston and then to New York, where he became a dealer in drugs, prostitution, numbers running and con games. He described himself in his autobiography as a predatory animal who deliberately invited his own death. Before he reached his 21st birthday, Malcolm was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to eight to ten years to a
Massachusetts prison in February 1946. While in prison, Malcolm had two profound conversions, intellectual and spiritual. Through the example of an inmate, he discovered the power of the intellect. He became a voracious reader, disciplined thinker and skilled debater. In 1948, under the influence of his family, Malcolm became a member of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam and its most effective recruiter and articulate defender. The nation reversed the value system of white America by making everything black good and
everything white evil. It substituted black supremacy for white supremacy. While Malcolm accepted the theology of the nation, it was his black nationalist philosophy emphasizing self-respect, self-defense, which inspired his intellectual imagination and fueled his religious commitment. He enjoyed giving whites the same medicine they dished out to blacks. Unlike Martin King, who had no taste for violence in any form, Malcolm viewed retaliatory violence as a necessary response to criminal acts. That is the only language criminals
understand, he contended. To love someone who hates you is to speak a language they do not understand, like speaking French to a person who only knows German. Malcolm learned this eye for an eye principle on the streets of Boston and New York, where a survivor depended on doing to others before they did it to you. He also learned it from reading American history, which is replete with genocidal acts against the native people of this land and
against other people of color wherever this nation has decided to raise the American flag. That was why Malcolm said that the white man made a mistake of letting me read his history books. Malcolm was released from prison in August of 1952 and quickly became the most influential minister in the nation, second only to Elijah Muhammad, called the messenger. Malcolm was appointed the head of the prestigious temple number seven in New York and became the nation's national
spokesman, lecturing and debating white and black intellectuals in America's most prestigious universities. He distinguished himself as the most feared, controversial, and articulate race critic in America. Since the overt violence of the southern conservatives was obvious and effectively exposed by the media through Martin King and the civil rights movement, Malcolm focused his critique on the hidden racist violence of northern white liberals. Malcolm's attacks on white liberals was persistent and brutal. He exposed their link to the creation
of the urban ghettos where drugs, poverty, crime, unemployment, and bad housing are its defining characteristics. While Martin King praised white liberals for their support, Malcolm castigated them for their hypocrisy, professing to be for integration while creating de facto segregation in schools and and every segment of American life. When blacks managed to move into a white community, the liberals are the first to move. No issue angered Malcolm more than what whites said about violence and non-violence
in the civil rights movement. They urged blacks to follow Martin King embrace non-violence and reject violence in any form. Malcolm could hardly contain his rage as he pointed out the contradictions between what whites advised blacks to do to get their freedom and what whites did to get their own. Patrick Hendry did not practice the virtues of non-violence. George Washington was no pacifist, and when whites feel their rights are being violated, they do not advocate
turning the other cheek or kneeling down to pray. Because whites did not apply to themselves the same moral logic they urged upon blacks, Malcolm regarded them as the worst hypocrites on the planet. Malcolm did not advocate violence, however. He advocated self-defense. He believed that the right of self-defense is an essential element in the definition of humanity. Whites have always recognized this principle for themselves, but not for blacks. This kind of racist thinking infuriated Malcolm.
If whites have a right to defend themselves against their enemies, why not blacks? Malcolm used provocative language to express his rage. If you want to know what I'll do, figure out what you will do. I'll do the same thing, only more of it. He contended that blacks should lose any means necessary to get their freedom, and whites should be prepared for what he called reciprocal bleeding. He did not regard such language as violent. He called it
intelligence. A black person has the right to do whatever is necessary to get their freedom as other human beings have done to get theirs. Malcolm regarded nonviolence as a ridiculous philosophy, ones that whites would never embrace as their own. He never understood why Martin King adopted it. How could blacks be regarded as human beings if we do not defend ourselves, he said. Everything in creation has a right to defend themselves except the American Negro. It pained
Malcolm to see black men, women, children being beaten, kicked, and attacked by dogs. If the government does not protect black people, he contended, then black people are within their rights to protect themselves. In contrast to the portrayal of Martin King as a promoter of love and nonviolence, the media portrayed Malcolm X as a preacher of hate and violence. They also, along with the FBI, were effective in creating a dissension within the nation, especially between Malcolm and
Mohammed. In December of 1963, Mohammed suspended Malcolm purportedly for saying that the assassination of President Kennedy was a case of the chicken coming home to roost. Three months later, Malcolm voted from the nation. He made a pilgrimage to Mecca, became a Sunni Muslim, adopted the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, and rejected the racist ideology of the nation of Islam. Malcolm also went to Africa to connect the black freedom movement in the U.S. with liberation
movements around the world. It is incorrect, he said, to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict between blacks and whites or purely as an American problem. Rather, we are today seeking a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter, unquote. While Malcolm's separation from the nation and subsequent experience in Mecca and Africa had a profound effect on his philosophy of freedom, causing him to reject the racist ideology
of Elijah Mohammed, yet he did not relinquish his self-defense philosophy and his radical critique of white supremacy. For Malcolm, white America remained a racist nation and Christianity white nationalism. The animosity between Malcolm and the nation deepened. They firebombed Malcolm's house one week before a team of assassins murdered him as he was about to speak at the Audubon Ballroom February 21, 1965. It was widely said that Malcolm died by the violence he fomented, but it is
more accurate to say that he died exposing white violence and fighting for the freedom of African Americans and other oppressed peoples throughout the world. Both Martin and Malcolm were 39 when they were assassinated. Ironically, the blacks Malcolm's love killed him. They could not tolerate Malcolm's truth. It was too powerful, too profoundly human, transcending race and other reactionary limits. A lone gunman killed Martin. He symbolized white America's inability to tolerate any black person who refuses to stay
in his or her place. Staying in an assigned place is something that neither Martin nor Malcolm could do. Their spirits were too powerful to be contained or restrained. In this sense, Martin and Malcolm followed the path of Jesus the Galilean, whose rebellion against the place assigned to him led to the cross. Most theologians, especially in the U.S., find the places they are assigned quite comfortable. They stay in their places and write essays and books about
this and that and say little, if anything, about the inhuman places this society assigns to the poor and people of color. They are like the learned during Jesus' time. They get bogged down in things that may be intellectually interested for their group, but hardly matters when considered in the light of what the gospel demands of us today. We need theologians and preachers like Martin and Malcolm to show us the way so we will be able to
make the gospel of Jesus so plain, so clear that no one will be able to claim that they did not know what it demands of us. We today have much to learn from Martin and Malcolm as we seek to create a community, a nation, and a world that are both just and peaceful. They were both disciplined thinkers and responsible activists. Though their views on nonviolence and violence were different, they complemented and corrected each other, showing us
that an abstract, absolutist, and uncritical commitment to violence or nonviolence on Martin or Malcolm is wrong-headed. We do not need to choose between Martin and Malcolm, but rather acknowledge the value in both. Our primary task today is to do what Martin and Malcolm did in their day. We must not simply adopt Martin or Malcolm or both and think that we have the answers to our racial problems. We should stand on their intellectual and spiritual foundation,
but their thought cannot serve as a substitute for our own thinking. We have to think for ourselves because we have problems that Martin and Malcolm never faced. We should use them as the springboard for our creative thinking and militant action. Our reflective task is not easy, and it will take a lot of hard, disciplined thinking about freedom, what it means, and how to achieve it. Martin and Malcolm's life and writings give us theoretical ideas and practical
examples to work with. They remind us that we have a great African-American intellectual tradition that stretches back to Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Boyce, Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko. With these revolutionary resources, we have enough intellectual and spiritual power to move into the 21st century, ready to face anything that hinders freedom. If we stand together as proud, disciplined thinkers and militant people, the
movement of justice will not be contained. I hope that we will not let our differences destroy our much-needed unity. We can learn from Martin and Malcolm about how to be different and yet work together for the same cause. I only hope that we can sustain our struggle for freedom, keep on keeping on, so that our children and our children's children will be able to live in a clean and safe environment and a just and peaceful world.