Nonviolence and Social Change

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr delivered a lecture calling on the “dispossessed of this nation” to revolt in nonviolent struggle. We reprint it here in full.

Martin Luther King Jr at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963.Rowland Scherman / US National Archives and Records Administration


There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light, and normal traffic had better get out of its way. “Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed.

There is a fire raging now for the Negroes and the poor of this society. They are living in tragic conditions because of the terrible economic injustices that keep them locked in as an “underclass,” as the sociologists are now calling it. Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. They need brigades of ambulance drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.

Excerpted from The Radical King by Martin Luther King Jr, edited and introduced by Cornel West (Beacon Press, 2014). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

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