And so the collision course is set. The people cry for freedom and the congress attempts to legislate repression. Millions, yes billions, are appropriated for mass murder; but the most meager pittance for foreign aid for international development is crushed in the surge of reaction. Unemployment rages at a major depression level in the black ghettos, but the bi-partisan response is an anti-riot bill rather than a serious poverty program. The modest proposals for model cities, rent supplement and rat control, pitiful as they were to began with, get caught in the maze of congressional inaction. And I submit to you tonight, that a congress that proves to be more anti-negro than anti-rat needs to be dismissed.
It seems that our legislative assemblies have adopted Nero as their patron saint and are bent on fiddling while our cities burn.
…
Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism.
Martin Luther King, Jr. “The Three Evils of Society” 1967
MLK: The Three Evils of Society (The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change)
Scott Boehmer 