Lecture of How Your Art Is Not Good Enough the First Years

Nobel Lecture*, December 11, 1964

The quest for peace and justice

It is incommunicable to brainstorm this lecture without again expressing my deep appreciation to the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament for bestowing upon me and the civil rights movement in the U.s. such a keen award. Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained past those symbols called words. Their significant can only be articulated past the inaudible linguistic communication of the heart. Such is the moment I am soon experiencing. I experience this high and joyous moment non for myself alone but for those devotees of nonviolence who have moved so courageously confronting the ramparts of racial injustice and who in the procedure have caused a new estimate of their own human worth. Many of them are young and cultured. Others are middle aged and centre class. The majority are poor and untutored. But they are all united in the serenity conviction that it is better to suffer in dignity than to take segregation in humiliation. These are the real heroes of the freedom struggle: they are the noble people for whom I accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

This evening I would like to utilize this lofty and historic platform to talk over what appears to me to be the almost pressing problem confronting mankind today. Modern man has brought this whole world to an monumental threshold of the time to come. He has reached new and amazing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed fourth dimension in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern homo's scientific and technological progress.

Notwithstanding, in spite of these spectacular strides in scientific discipline and engineering science, and even so unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we accept become materially, the poorer we have get morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that circuitous of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we take allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the ways past which we alive to outdistance the ends for which nosotros live. So much of modern life tin can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreauⁱ: "Improved means to an unimproved stop". This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual "lag" must exist eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the "without" of man'southward nature subjugates the "within", nighttime tempest clouds begin to form in the world.

This problem of spiritual and moral lag, which constitutes modern man's master dilemma, expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man'south ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably jump to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and state of war.

The outset problem that I would like to mention is racial injustice. The struggle to eliminate the evil of racial injustice constitutes 1 of the major struggles of our time. The present upsurge of the Negro people of the The states grows out of a deep and passionate determination to make freedom and equality a reality "here" and "now". In i sense the ceremonious rights move in the United States is a special American phenomenon which must be understood in the lite of American history and dealt with in terms of the American situation. But on some other and more than of import level, what is happening in the Usa today is a relatively modest part of a globe evolution.

We live in a twenty-four hour period, says the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead²,"when civilization is shifting its basic outlook: a major turning betoken in history where the presuppositions on which gild is structured are being analyzed, sharply challenged, and profoundly inverse." What we are seeing at present is a liberty explosion, the realization of "an idea whose fourth dimension has come", to use Victor Hugo's phrase³. The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited masses, rising from dungeons of oppression to the vivid hills of freedom, in i majestic chorus the ascent masses singing, in the words of our freedom song, "Ain't gonna let nobody plough u.s.a. around."⁴ All over the world, like a fever, the freedom movement is spreading in the widest liberation in history. The great masses of people are determined to stop the exploitation of their races and land. They are awake and moving toward their goal like a tidal wave. You tin hear them rumbling in every village street, on the docks, in the houses, among the students, in the churches, and at political meetings. Historic movement was for several centuries that of the nations and societies of Western Europe out into the remainder of the globe in "conquest" of various sorts. That period, the era of colonialism, is at an stop. East is meeting West. The earth is beingness redistributed. Yeah, nosotros are "shifting our bones outlooks".

These developments should non surprise whatsoever student of history. Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom somewhen manifests itself. The Bible tells the thrilling story of how Moses stood in Pharaoh's court centuries agone and cried, "Allow my people become."^v This is a kind of opening chapter in a continuing story. The present struggle in the United States is a later chapter in the same unfolding story. Something inside has reminded the Negro of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can exist gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his blackness brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers in Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of groovy urgency toward the promised country of racial justice.

Fortunately, some significant strides have been fabricated in the struggle to terminate the long night of racial injustice. We have seen the magnificent drama of independence unfold in Asia and Africa. Just thirty years ago there were just three independent nations in the whole of Africa. Just today 30-five African nations have risen from colonial bondage. In the United States we accept witnessed the gradual demise of the arrangement of racial segregation. The Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools gave a legal and constitutional deathblow to the whole doctrine of separate but equal⁶. The Court decreed that separate facilities are inherently unequal and that to segregate a child on the basis of race is to deny that child equal protection of the police. This decision came as a beacon light of promise to millions of disinherited people. Then came that glowing day a few months ago when a strong Ceremonious Rights Pecker became the law of our land⁷. This bill, which was first recommended and promoted by President Kennedy, was passed because of the overwhelming support and perseverance of millions of Americans, Negro and white. Information technology came as a vivid interlude in the long and sometimes turbulent struggle for civil rights: the beginning of a second emancipation declaration providing a comprehensive legal basis for equality of opportunity. Since the passage of this neb we have seen some encouraging and surprising signs of compliance. I am happy to written report that, by and large, communities all over the southern part of the United states of america are obeying the Civil Rights Constabulary and showing remarkable proficient sense in the procedure.

Another indication that progress is existence made was found in the recent presidential election in the United States. The American people revealed smashing maturity past overwhelmingly rejecting a presidential candidate who had become identified with extremism, racism, and retrogression^viii. The voters of our nation rendered a telling blow to the radical right⁹. They defeated those elements in our society which seek to pit white against Negro and pb the nation down a unsafe Fascist path.

Permit me not leave you with a false impression. The trouble is far from solved. We still take a long, long mode to go before the dream of freedom is a reality for the Negro in the United States. To put it figuratively in biblical language, nosotros take left the dusty soils of Egypt and crossed a Red Bounding main whose waters had for years been hardened by a long and piercing winter of massive resistance. But earlier we attain the majestic shores of the Promised Land, there is a frustrating and bewildering wilderness alee. We must all the same face prodigious hilltops of opposition and gigantic mountains of resistance. But with patient and house conclusion we will press on until every valley of despair is exalted to new peaks of hope, until every mountain of pride and irrationality is made depression by the leveling process of humility and pity; until the rough places of injustice are transformed into a smooth aeroplane of equality of opportunity; and until the crooked places of prejudice are transformed by the straightening process of vivid-eyed wisdom.

What the principal sections of the ceremonious rights movement in the United states are maxim is that the need for dignity, equality, jobs, and citizenship volition not exist abased or diluted or postponed. If that means resistance and conflict we shall not flinch. Nosotros shall not be cowed. We are no longer afraid.

The give-and-take that symbolizes the spirit and the outward form of our come across is nonviolence, and it is doubtless that cistron which fabricated information technology seem appropriate to award a peace prize to one identified with struggle. Broadly speaking, nonviolence in the ceremonious rights struggle has meant not relying on arms and weapons of struggle. It has meant noncooperation with customs and laws which are institutional aspects of a regime of discrimination and enslavement. Information technology has meant direct participation of masses in protest, rather than reliance on indirect methods which frequently do not involve masses in action at all.

Nonviolence has also meant that my people in the agonizing struggles of recent years have taken suffering upon themselves instead of inflicting it on others. It has meant, as I said, that we are no longer afraid and cowed. Only in some substantial caste information technology has meant that we do not desire to instill fear in others or into the society of which we are a role. The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites. Information technology seeks no victory over anyone. It seeks to liberate American gild and to share in the self-liberation of all the people.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence ofttimes brings about momentary results. Nations accept oftentimes won their independence in battle. Just in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social trouble: it but creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical considering it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: information technology seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than dear. It destroys community and makes alliance impossible. It leaves gild in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

In a real sense nonviolence seeks to redeem the spiritual and moral lag that I spoke of earlier as the principal dilemma of modern human. It seeks to secure moral ends through moral means. Nonviolence is a powerful and but weapon. Indeed, it is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.

I believe in this method because I think information technology is the just way to reestablish a broken community. It is the method which seeks to implement the just law by appealing to the censor of the keen decent bulk who through blindness, fear, pride, and irrationality have allowed their consciences to sleep.

The nonviolent resisters can summarize their bulletin in the post-obit uncomplicated terms: we will take direct activeness confronting injustice despite the failure of governmental and other official agencies to act first. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. Nosotros will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully considering our aim is to persuade. Nosotros adopt the means of nonviolence considering our stop is a community at peace with itself. We will effort to persuade with our words, just if our words fail, nosotros will endeavor to persuade with our acts. We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise, but nosotros are ready to endure when necessary and even risk our lives to go witnesses to truth as nosotros meet it.

This arroyo to the problem of racial injustice is not at all without successful precedent. Information technology was used in a magnificent way by Mohandas 1000. Gandhi to challenge the might of the British Empire and free his people from the political domination and economical exploitation inflicted upon them for centuries. He struggled only with the weapons of truth, soul force, not-injury, and backbone^ten.

In the past x years unarmed gallant men and women of the U.s. have given living testimony to the moral power and efficacy of nonviolence. By the thousands, faceless, bearding, relentless young people, black and white, have temporarily left the ivory towers of learning for the barricades of bias. Their courageous and disciplined activities have come as a refreshing oasis in a desert sweltering with the heat of injustice. They have taken our whole nation back to those peachy wells of commonwealth which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Ane day all of America will exist proud of their achievements¹¹.

I am just too well enlightened of the human weaknesses and failures which exist, the doubts most the efficacy of nonviolence, and the open advocacy of violence past some. But I am still convinced that nonviolence is both the most practically audio and morally splendid way to grapple with the age-quondam trouble of racial injustice.

A second evil which plagues the modern world is that of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, it projects its nagging, prehensile tentacles in lands and villages all over the world. Nigh 2-thirds of the peoples of the world go to bed hungry at night. They are undernourished, ill-housed, and shabbily clad. Many of them take no houses or beds to sleep in. Their only beds are the sidewalks of the cities and the dusty roads of the villages. Well-nigh of these poverty-stricken children of God have never seen a physician or a dentist. This trouble of poverty is not just seen in the course segmentation betwixt the highly developed industrial nations and the then-called underdeveloped nations; it is seen in the great economic gaps inside the rich nations themselves. Take my own state for instance. Nosotros have adult the greatest system of production that history has always known. Nosotros accept become the richest nation in the world. Our national gross product this year volition reach the astounding figure of almost 650 billion dollars. Notwithstanding, at to the lowest degree one-fifth of our fellow citizens – some x million families, comprising nigh forty 1000000 individuals – are bound to a miserable culture of poverty. In a sense the poverty of the poor in America is more frustrating than the poverty of Africa and Asia. The misery of the poor in Africa and Asia is shared misery, a fact of life for the vast majority; they are all poor together equally a result of years of exploitation and underdevelopment. In sad contrast, the poor in America know that they live in the richest nation in the earth, and that even though they are perishing on a lonely island of poverty they are surrounded by a vast body of water of textile prosperity. Glistening towers of glass and steel easily seen from their slum dwellings bound up well-nigh overnight. Jet liners speed over their ghettoes at 600 miles an hour; satellites streak through outer space and reveal details of the moon. President Johnson, in his State of the Matrimony Message¹², emphasized this contradiction when he heralded the The states' "highest standard of living in the earth", and deplored that information technology was accompanied by "dislocation; loss of jobs, and the specter of poverty in the midst of plenty".

And then information technology is obvious that if homo is to redeem his spiritual and moral "lag", he must go all out to bridge the social and economic gulf between the "haves" and the "have nots" of the world. Poverty is one of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern life.

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of information technology. More a century and a half ago people began to exist disturbed about the twin problems of population and production. A thoughtful Englishman named Malthus wrote a book¹³ that set forth some rather frightening conclusions. He predicted that the human family was gradually moving toward global starvation considering the world was producing people faster than it was producing nutrient and material to support them. Later scientists, however, disproved the conclusion of Malthus, and revealed that he had vastly underestimated the resources of the world and the resourcefulness of man.

Not too many years ago, Dr. Kirtley Mather, a Harvard geologist, wrote a volume entitled Enough and to Spare ¹⁴. He set forth the basic theme that famine is wholly unnecessary in the modernistic globe. Today, therefore, the question on the agenda must read: Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any metropolis, at any table when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all flesh with the bones necessities of life? Fifty-fifty deserts can be irrigated and tiptop soil tin can exist replaced. We cannot complain of a lack of land, for there are twenty-5 million square miles of tillable land, of which we are using less than seven million. We have astonishing knowledge of vitamins, nutrition, the chemical science of food, and the versatility of atoms. There is no arrears in human being resources; the deficit is in human volition. The well-off and the secure accept too oft become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and impecuniousness in their midst. The poor in our countries take been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to get invisible. Only as nonviolence exposed the ugliness of racial injustice, so must the infection and sickness of poverty be exposed and healed – not only its symptoms but its basic causes. This, too, volition be a fierce struggle, but we must not be afraid to pursue the remedy no affair how formidable the job.

The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty. The rich nations must employ their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a bully nation is a compassionate nation. No private or nation can be cracking if it does non have a business concern for "the to the lowest degree of these". Securely etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are souls of space metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. If we feel this equally a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with starvation and ill health when nosotros have the means to assist them. The wealthy nations must go all out to span the gulf between the rich minority and the poor majority.

In the final analysis, the rich must non ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a unmarried garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent. The desperation of the poor diminishes the rich, and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich. We are inevitably our brothers' keeper because of the interrelated structure of reality. John Donne interpreted this truth in graphic terms when he affirmed¹⁵:

No homo is an Iland, intire of its selfe: every
man is a peece of the Continent, a office of the
maine: if a Clod bee done away by the Sea,
Europe is the lesse, besides every bit if a Promontorie
were, every bit well as if a Mannor of thy friends
or of thine owne were: any mans death
diminishes me, because I am involved in
Mankinde: and therefore never transport to know
for whom the bong tolls: it tolls for thee.

A third not bad evil confronting our world is that of war. Recent events accept vividly reminded us that nations are not reducing simply rather increasing their arsenals of weapons of mass devastation. The best brains in the highly developed nations of the world are devoted to military technology. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has non been halted, in spite of the Limited Test Ban Treaty¹⁶. On the opposite, the detonation of an diminutive device by the beginning nonwhite, non- Western, and so-called underdeveloped power, namely the Chinese People's Republic¹⁷, opens new vistas of exposure of vast multitudes, the whole of humanity, to insidious terrorization past the e'er-nowadays threat of annihilation. The fact that well-nigh of the fourth dimension human beings put the truth virtually the nature and risks of the nuclear war out of their minds considering it is as well painful and therefore not "acceptable", does not alter the nature and risks of such war. The device of "rejection" may temporarily cover up anxiety, but it does not bequeath peace of mind and emotional security.

So homo's proneness to engage in state of war is still a fact. Merely wisdom born of feel should tell the states that state of war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil strength, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that state of war may serve as a negative good. If nosotros assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must observe an alternative to war. In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. A then-called limited war volition leave little more than than a baleful legacy of homo suffering, political turmoil, and spiritual disillusionment. A world war – God forbid! – will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a homo race whose folly led inexorably to ultimate expiry. And so if modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with state of war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno such equally fifty-fifty the mind of Dante could not imagine.

Therefore, I venture to propose to all of you and all who hear and may somewhen read these words, that the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence become immediately a discipline for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human being conflict, by no means excluding the relations between nations. It is, after all, nation-states which brand war, which accept produced the weapons which threaten the survival of flesh, and which are both genocidal and suicidal in graphic symbol.

Here also we have ancient habits to bargain with, vast structures of ability, indescribably complicated problems to solve. But unless nosotros abdicate our humanity altogether and succumb to fear and impotence in the presence of the weapons we have ourselves created, it is as imperative and urgent to put an end to state of war and violence betwixt nations equally information technology is to put an end to racial injustice. Equality with whites volition inappreciably solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a society under the spell of terror and a world doomed to extinction.

I practice not wish to minimize the complication of the problems that need to be faced in achieving disarmament and peace. Just I retrieve it is a fact that nosotros shall not have the volition, the courage, and the insight to deal with such matters unless in this field nosotros are prepared to undergo a mental and spiritual reevaluation – a change of focus which will enable u.s. to see that the things which seem most existent and powerful are indeed now unreal and have come under the sentence of expiry. We demand to brand a supreme effort to generate the readiness, indeed the eagerness, to enter into the new world which is now possible, "the metropolis which hath foundations, whose architect and maker is God"¹⁸.

We will not build a peaceful world past following a negative path. It is non plenty to say "We must not wage war." It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, merely on the positive affirmation of peace. There is a fascinating little story that is preserved for us in Greek literature about Ulysses and the Sirens. The Sirens had the ability to sing and then sweetly that sailors could not resist steering toward their isle. Many ships were lured upon the rocks, and men forgot home, duty, and laurels every bit they flung themselves into the sea to be embraced past arms that drew them downwards to decease. Ulysses, determined not to be lured by the Sirens, first decided to tie himself tightly to the mast of his boat, and his crew stuffed their ears with wax. But finally he and his crew learned a improve style to save themselves: they took on board the beautiful vocalizer Orpheus whose melodies were sweeter than the music of the Sirens. When Orpheus sang, who bothered to listen to the Sirens?

So we must fix our vision not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but upon the positive affirmation of peace. We must meet that peace represents a sweeter music, a catholic melody that is far superior to the discords of war. Somehow we must transform the dynamics of the earth ability struggle from the negative nuclear artillery race which no one can win to a positive contest to harness man's creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all of the nations of the globe. In curt, nosotros must shift the arms race into a "peace race". If we have the will and determination to mount such a peace offensive, we will unlock hitherto tightly sealed doors of hope and transform our imminent cosmic elegy into a psalm of creative fulfillment.

All that I accept said boils downwardly to the bespeak of affirming that mankind'southward survival is dependent upon human's ability to solve the issues of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of these problems is in plough dependent upon man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony. Some years ago a famous novelist died. Amidst his papers was constitute a listing of suggested story plots for future stories, the nearly prominently underscored being this one: "A widely separated family inherits a house in which they take to live together." This is the great new problem of mankind. Nosotros have inherited a big house, a great "earth house" in which we take to live together – blackness and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we tin never once again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one large world, to live with each other.

This means that more than and more our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than exclusive. We must now give an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in club to preserve the best in our individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern across one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a phone call for an all-embracing and unconditional beloved for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has at present become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am non speaking of some sentimental and weak response which is fiddling more than emotional bosh. I am speaking of that strength which all of the not bad religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist conventionalities about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the First Epistle of Saint John¹⁹:

Let us dear i another: for dearest is of God; and everyone
that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
He that loveth non knoweth not God; for God is love.
If we honey 1 another, God dwelleth in us, and His
love is perfected in united states.

Allow us hope that this spirit volition become the social club of the day. Equally Arnold Toynbee^twenty says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving option of life and good confronting the damning selection of decease and evil. Therefore the first promise in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last discussion." We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rise tides of detest. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. Love is the key to the solution of the problems of the world.

Let me close by proverb that I have the personal religion that mankind will somehow ascent upwards to the occasion and requite new directions to an age drifting rapidly to its doom. In spite of the tensions and uncertainties of this period something greatly meaningful is taking place. Old systems of exploitation and oppression are passing away, and out of the womb of a frail globe new systems of justice and equality are being built-in. Doors of opportunity are gradually being opened to those at the lesser of society. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are developing a new sense of "some-bodiness" and carving a tunnel of promise through the dark mount of despair. "The people who sat in darkness have seen a smashing low-cal."²¹ Here and there an individual or grouping dares to love, and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity. So in a real sense this is a neat fourth dimension to be live. Therefore, I am not however discouraged about the future. Granted that the easygoing optimism of yesterday is incommunicable. Granted that those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face up uncomfortable jail terms, painful threats of death; they volition however be dilapidated by the storms of persecution, leading them to the nagging feeling that they can no longer deport such a heavy burden, and the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. Granted that we face up a world crisis which leaves the states standing and so ofttimes amid the surging murmur of life's restless sea. Only every crunch has both its dangers and its opportunities. It can spell either salvation or doom. In a dark confused world the kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.

* Dr. King delivered this lecture in the Auditorium of the University of Oslo. This text is taken from Les Prix Nobel en 1964. The text in the New York Times is excerpted. His speech communication of acceptance delivered the day before in the same place is reported fully both in Les Prix Nobel en 1964 and the New York Times.

one. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American poet and essayist.

2. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). British philosopher and mathematician, professor at the Academy of London and Harvard University.

3. "In that location is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world and that is an idea whose time has come." Translations differ; probable origin is Victor Hugo, Histoire d'un law-breaking, "Decision-La Chute", chap. 10.

4. "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around" is the title of an old Baptist spiritual.

5. Exodus v:1; 8:1; nine:1; x:iii.

6. "Dark-brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka", 347 U.S. 483, contains the decision of May 17, 1954, requiring desegregation of the public schools past us. "Bolling vs. Sharpe", 347 U.South. 497, contains the decision of aforementioned date requiring desegregation of public schools past the federal government; i.e. in Washington, D.C. "Brown vs. Lath of Education of Topeka", Nos. ane-5. 349 U.Due south. 249, contains the opinion of May 31, 1955, on appeals from the decisions in the ii cases cited above, ordering access to "public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed".

7. Public Constabulary 88-352, signed past President Johnson on July two, 1964.

8. Both Les Prix Nobel and the New York Times read "retrogress".

9. Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater by a popular vote of 43, 128, 956 to 27,177,873.

ten. For a annotation on Gandhi, seep. 329, fn. 1.

11. For accounts of the civil rights activities by both whites and blacks in the decade from 1954 to 1964, run across Alan F. Westin, Liberty Now: The Civil Rights Struggle in America (New York: Basic Books, 1964), especially Part Four, "The Techniques of the Civil Rights Struggle"; Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Printing, 1964); Eugene V. Rostow, "The Freedom Riders and the Future", The Reporter (June 22, 1961); James Peck, Cracking the Colour Line: Nonviolent Straight Action Methods of Eliminating Racial Discrimination (New York: Cadre, 1960).

12. January eight, 1964.

13. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).

14. Kirtley F. Mather, Enough and to Spare: Mother Earth Can Nourish Every Human being in Freedom (New York: Harper, 1944).

fifteen. John Donne (1572?-1631), English poet, in the last lines of "Devotions" (1624).

16. Officially called "Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Underwater", and signed by Russia, England, and Us on July 25, 1963.

17. On October xvi, 1964.

eighteen. Hebrews Ii: 10.

19. I John 4:7-8, 12.

xx. Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889- ), British historian whose monumental work is the 10-volume A Study of Story (1934-1954).

21. This quotation may be based on a phrase from Luke i:79, "To requite light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death"; or one from Psalms 107:ten, "Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death"; or one from Marking Twain's To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901), "The people who sit in darkness have noticed information technology …".

Original program for Martin Luther King Jr.'s visit to Oslo (pdf 55 kB)
Kindly provided by the Norwegian Nobel Found