Martin Luther King Jr.

[TShango]

In September, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr., was only 38-years-old but
already president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize when he took the podium at APA's Annual
Convention in Washington, D.C.

A re-reading of his powerful address today captures the urgent tone of
the 60s, as he cajoled the nation's social scientists to 'tell it like
it is.' In fact, to APA's membership, whom he addressed as 'concerned
friends of good will,' his plea for help in changing a society 'poisoned
to its soul by racism,' seems now ever more poignant in light of the
tragedy that struck only seven months later.

The words he spoke that Sept. 1, as the convention's Invited
Distinguished Address, were reprinted in the Journal of Social Issues
(Vol. 24,
No. 1, 1968). While the speech was in galley proofs, the shocking and
numbing news of his assassination was released.

Here is the full text of his speech.


The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement


By Martin Luther King Jr.

It is always a very rich and rewarding experience when I can take a
brief break from the day-to-day demands of our struggle for freedom and
human dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with
concerned friends of good will all over the nation. It is particularly a
great privilege to discuss these issues with members of the academic
community, who are constantly writing about and dealing with the
problems
that we face and who have the tremendous responsibility of molding the
minds of young men and women all over the country.

The Civil Rights Movement needs the help of social scientists

In the preface to their book, 'Applied Sociology' (1965), S. M. Miller
and Alvin Gouldner state: 'It is the historic mission of the social
sciences to enable mankind to take possession of society.' It follows
that
for Negroes who substantially are excluded from society this science
is needed even more desperately than for any other group in the
population.

For social scientists, the opportunity to serve in a life-giving
purpose is a humanist challenge of rare distinction. Negroes too are
eager
for a rendezvous with truth and discovery. We are aware that social
scientists, unlike some of their colleagues in the physical sciences,
have
been spared the grim feelings of guilt that attended the invention of
nuclear weapons of destruction. Social scientists, in the main, are
fortunate to be able to extirpate evil, not to invent it.

If the Negro needs social sciences for direction and for
self-understanding, the white society is in even more urgent need.
White America
needs to understand that it is poisoned to its soul by racism and the
understanding needs to be carefully documented and consequently more
difficult to reject. The present crisis arises because although it is
historically imperative that our society take the next step to equality,
we find ourselves psychologically and socially imprisoned. All too many
white
Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the
product of these conditions-the Negro himself.

White America is seeking to keep the walls of segregation substantially
intact while the evolution of society and the Negro's desperation is
causing them to crumble. The white majority, unprepared and unwilling to
accept radical structural change, is resisting and producing chaos
while complaining that if there were no chaos orderly change would come.


Negroes want the social scientist to address the white community and
'tell it like it is.' White America has an appalling lack of knowledge
concerning the reality of Negro life. One reason some advances were made
in the South during the past decade was the discovery by northern
whites of the brutal facts of southern segregated life. It was the Negro
who educated the nation by dramatizing the evils through nonviolent
protest. The social scientist played little or no role in disclosing
truth.
The Negro action movement with raw courage did it virtually alone. When
the majority of the country could not live with the extremes of
brutality they witnessed, political remedies were enacted and customs
were
altered.

These partial advances were, however, limited principally to the South
and progress did not automatically spread throughout the nation. There
was also little depth to the changes. White America stopped murder, but
that is not the same thing as ordaining brotherhood; nor is the ending
of lynch rule the same thing as inaugurating justice.

After some years of Negro-white unity and partial success, white
America shifted gears and went into reverse. Negroes, alive with hope
and enthusiasm, ran into sharply stiffened white resistance at all levels
and bitter tensions broke out in sporadic episodes of violence. New lines
of hostility were drawn and the era of good feeling disappeared.

The decade of 1955 to 1965, with its constructive elements, misled us.
Everyone, activists and social scientists, underestimated the amount of
violence and rage Negroes were suppressing and the amount of bigotry
the white majority was disguising.

Science should have been employed more fully to warn us that the Negro,
after 350 years of handicaps, mired in an intricate network of
contemporary barriers, could not be ushered into equality by tentative
and superficial changes.

Mass nonviolent protests, a social invention of Negroes, were effective
in Montgomery , Birmingham and Selma in forcing national legislation
which served to change Negro life sufficiently to curb explosions. But
when changes were confined to the South alone, the North, in the absence
of change, began to seethe.

The freedom movement did not adapt its tactics to the different and
unique northern urban conditions. It failed to see that nonviolent
marches
in the South were forms of rebellion. When Negroes took over the
streets and shops, southern society shook to its roots. Negroes could
contain their rage when they found the means to force relatively radical
changes in their environment.

In the North, on the other hand, street demonstrations were not even a
mild expression of militancy. The turmoil of cities absorbs
demonstrations as merely transitory drama which is ordinary in city
life. Without
a more effective tactic for upsetting the status quo, the power
structure could maintain its intransigence and hostility. Into the
vacuum of
inaction, violence and riots flowed and a new period opened.

Urban riots.

Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They
may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban
riots
are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The
rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of
institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community.
They are a
distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal
feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived
Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does
by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he
wants the experience of taking. But most of all, alienated from
society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people,
he is
shocking it by abusing property rights. There are thus elements of
emotional catharsis in the violent act. This may explain why most cities
in
which riots have occurred have not had a repetition, even though the
causative conditions remain. It is also noteworthy that the amount of
physical harm done to white people other than police is infinitesimal
and
in Detroit whites and Negroes looted in unity.

A profound judgment of today's riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a
century ago. He said, 'If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be
committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who
causes
the darkness.'

The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; theycreate discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorablethat Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are
born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes toabide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by lawin the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprivethe poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates buildingcodes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates
laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civicservices. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the whitesociety; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than aprisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared
with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminalwouldbe the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I havecome to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth inorder to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.
Vietnam War.

There is another cause of riots that is too important to mention
casually-the war in Vietnam . Here again, we are dealing with a
controversial
issue. But I am convinced that the war in Vietnam has played havoc with
our domestic destinies. The bombs that fall in Vietnam explode at
home. It does not take much to see what great damage this war has done
to
the image of our nation. It has left our country politically and morally
isolated in the world, where our only friends happen to be puppet
nations like Taiwan , Thailand and South Korea . The major allies in the
world that have been with us in war and peace are not with us in this
war.
As a result we find ourselves socially and politically isolated.

The war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has seriously
impaired the United Nations. It has exacerbated the hatreds between
continents, and worse still, between races. It has frustrated our
development
at home by telling our underprivileged citizens that we place
insatiable military demands above their most critical needs. It has
greatly
contributed to the forces of reaction in America , and strengthened the
military-industrial complex, against which even President Eisenhower
solemnly warned us. It has practically destroyed Vietnam , and left
thousands
of American and Vietnamese youth maimed and mutilated. And it has
exposed the whole world to the risk of nuclear warfare.

As I looked at what this war was doing to our nation, and to the
domestic situation and to the Civil Rights movement, I found it
necessary to
speak vigorously out against it. My speaking out against the war has
not gone without criticisms. There are those who tell me that I should
stick with civil rights, and stay in my place. I can only respond that I
have fought too hard and long to end segregated public accommodations
to segregate my own moral concerns. It is my deep conviction that
justice is indivisible, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere. For those who tell me I am hurting the Civil Rights
movement, and
ask, 'Don't you think that in order to be respected, and in order to
regain support, you must stop talking against the war?' I can only say
that I am not a consensus leader. I do not seek to determine what is
right and wrong by taking a Gallop Poll to determine majority opinion.
And
it is again my deep conviction that ultimately a genuine leader is not
a searcher of consensus, but a molder of consensus. On some positions
cowardice asks the question, 'Is it safe?!' Expediency asks the
question, 'Is it politic?' Vanity asks the question, 'Is it popular?'
But
conscience must ask the question, 'Is it right?!' And there comes a time
when one must take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic, nor
popular. But one must take it because it is right. And that is where I
find
myself today.

Moreover, I am convinced, even if war continues, that a genuine massive
act of concern will do more to quell riots than the most massive
deployment of troops.

Unemployment.

The unemployment of Negro youth ranges up to 40 percent in some slums.
The riots are almost entirely youth events-the age range of
participants is from 13 to 25. What hypocrisy it is to talk of saving
the new
generation-to make it the generation of hope-while consigning it to
unemployment and provoking it to violent alternatives.

When our nation was bankrupt in the thirties we created an agency to
provide jobs to all at their existing level of skill. In our
overwhelming
affluence today what excuse is there for not setting up a national
agency for full employment immediately?

The other program which would give reality to hope and opportunity
would be the demolition of the slums to be replaced by decent housing
built
by residents of the ghettos.

These programs are not only eminently sound and vitally needed, but
they have the support of an overwhelming majority of the nation-white
and
Negro. The Harris Poll on August 21, 1967, disclosed that an astounding
69 percent of the country support a works program to provide
employment to all and an equally astonishing 65 percent approve a
program to
tear down the slums.

There is a program and there is heavy majority support for it. Yet, the
administration and Congress tinker with trivial proposals to limit
costs in an extravagant gamble with disaster.

The President has lamented that he cannot persuade Congress. He can, if
the will is there, go to the people, mobilize the people's support and
thereby substantially increase his power to persuade Congress. Our
most urgent task is to find the tactics that will move the government no
matter how determined it is to resist.

Civil disobedience.

I believe we will have to find the militant middle between riots on the
one hand and weak and timid supplication for justice on the other
hand. That middle ground, I believe, is civil disobedience. It can be
aggressive but nonviolent; it can dislocate but not destroy. The
specific
planning will take some study and analysis to avoid mistakes of the past
when it was employed on too small a scale and sustained too briefly.

Civil disobedience can restore Negro-white unity. There have been some
very important sane white voices even during the most desperate moments
of the riots. One reason is that the urban crisis intersects the Negro
crisis in the city. Many white decision- makers may care little about
saving Negroes, but they must care about saving their cities. The vast
majority of production is created in cities; most white Americans live
in them. The suburbs to which they flee cannot exist detached from
cities. Hence powerful white elements have goals that merge with ours.

Role for the social scientist

Now there are many roles for social scientists in meeting these
problems. Kenneth Clark has said that Negroes are moved by a suicide
instinct
in riots and Negroes know there is a tragic truth in this observation.
Social scientists should also disclose the suicide instinct that
governs the administration and Congress in their total failure to
respond
constructively.

What other areas are there for social scientists to assist the civil
rights movement? There are many, but I would like to suggest three
because they have an urgent quality.

Social science may be able to search out some answers to the problem of
Negro leadership. E. Franklin Frazier, in his profound work, Black
Bourgeoisie, laid painfully bare the tendency of the upwardly mobile
Negro
to separate from his community, divorce himself from responsibility to
it, while failing to gain acceptance in the white community. There has
been significant improvements from the days Frazier researched, but
anyone knowledgeable about Negro life knows its middle class is not yet
bearing its weight. Every riot has carried strong overtone of hostility
of lower class Negroes toward the affluent Negro and vice versa. No
contemporary study of scientific depth has totally studied this problem.
Social science should be able to suggest mechanisms to create a
wholesome black unity and a sense of peoplehood while the process of
integration proceeds.

As one example of this gap in research, there are no studies, to my
knowledge, to explain adequately the absence of Negro trade union
leadership. Eight-five percent of Negroes are working people. Some two
million
are in trade unions but in 50 years we have produced only one national
leader-A. Philip Randolph.

Discrimination explains a great deal, but not everything. The picture
is so dark even a few rays of light may signal a useful direction.

Political action.

The second area for scientific examination is political action. In the
past two decades, Negroes have expended more effort in quest of the
franchise than they have in all other campaigns combined.
Demonstrations,
sit-ins and marches, though more spectacular, are dwarfed by the
enormous number of man-hours expended to register millions, particularly
in
the South. Negro organizations from extreme militant to conservative
persuasion, Negro leaders who would not even talk to each other, all
have
been agreed on the key importance of voting. Stokely Carmichael said
black power means the vote and Roy Wilkins, while saying black power
means black death, also energetically sought the power of the ballot.

A recent major work by social scientists Matthew and Prothro concludes
that 'The concrete benefits to be derived from the franchise-under
conditions that prevail in the South-have often been exaggerated.,' that
voting is not the key that will unlock the door to racial equality
because 'the concrete measurable payoffs from Negro voting in the South
will not be revolutionary' (1966).

James A. Wilson supports this view, arguing, 'Because of the structure
of American politics as well as the nature of the Negro community,
Negro politics will accomplish only limited objectives' (1965).

If their conclusion can be supported, then the major effort Negroes
have invested in the past 20 years has been in the wrong direction and
the
major pillar of their hope is a pillar of sand. My own instinct is
that these views are essentially erroneous, but they must be seriously
examined.

The need for a penetrating massive scientific study of this subject
cannot be overstated. Lipset in 1957 asserted that a limitation in focus
in political sociology has resulted in a failure of much contemporary
research to consider a number of significant theoretical questions. The
time is short for social science to illuminate this critically important
area. If the main thrust of Negro effort has been, and remains,
substantially irrelevant, we may be facing an agonizing crisis of
tactical theory.

The third area for study concerns psychological and ideological changes
in Negroes. It is fashionable now to be pessimistic. Undeniably, the
freedom movement has encountered setbacks. Yet I still believe there are
significant aspects of progress.

Negroes today are experiencing an inner transformation that is
liberating them from ideological dependence on the white majority. What
has penetrated substantially all strata of Negro life is the revolutionary
idea that the philosophy and morals of the dominant white society are
not holy or sacred but in all too many respects are degenerate and profane.

Negroes have been oppressed for centuries not merely by bonds of
economic and political servitude. The worst aspect of their oppression
was their inability to question and defy the fundamental precepts of the
larger society. Negroes have been loath in the past to hurl any
fundamental challenges because they were coerced and conditioned into thinking
within the context of the dominant white ideology. This is changing and
new radical trends are appearing in Negro thought. I use radical in its
broad sense to refer to reaching into roots.

Ten years of struggle have sensitized and opened the Negro's eyes to
reaching. For the first time in their history, Negroes have become aware
of the deeper causes for the crudity and cruelty that governed white
society's responses to their needs. They discovered that their plight
was not a consequence of superficial prejudice but was systemic.

The slashing blows of backlash and frontlash have hurt the Negro, but
they have also awakened him and revealed the nature of the oppressor. To
lose illusions is to gain truth. Negroes have grown wiser and more
mature and they are hearing more clearly those who are raising
fundamental questions about our society whether the critics be Negro or white.
When this process of awareness and independence crystallizes, every
rebuke, every evasion, become hammer blows on the wedge that splits the
Negro
from the larger society.

Social science is needed to explain where this development is going to
take us. Are we moving away, not from integration, but from the society
which made it a problem in the first place? How deep and at what rate
of speed is this process occurring? These are some vital questions to
be answered if we are to have a clear sense of our direction.

We know we haven't found the answers to all forms of social change. We
know, however, that we did find some answers. We have achieved and we
are confident. We also know we are confronted now with far greater
complexities and we have not yet discovered all the theory we need.

And may I say together, we must solve the problems right here in
America . As I have said time and time again, Negroes still have faith in
America . Black people still have faith in a dream that we will all live
together as brothers in this country of plenty one day.

But I was distressed when I read in the New York Times of Aug. 31,
1967; that a sociologist from Michigan State University, the outgoing
president of the American Sociological Society, stated in San Francisco
that
Negroes should be given a chance to find an all Negro community in
South America: 'that the valleys of the Andes Mountains would be an
ideal
place for American Negroes to build a second Israel.' He further
declared that 'The United States Government should negotiate for a
remote but
fertile land in Equador , Peru or Bolivia for this relocation.'

I feel that it is rather absurd and appalling that a leading social
scientist today would suggest to black people, that after all these
years
of suffering an exploitation as well as investment in the American
dream, that we should turn around and run at this point in history. I
say
that we will not run! Professor Loomis even compared the relocation task
of the Negro to the relocation task of the Jews in Israel . The Jews
were made exiles. They did not choose to abandon Europe , they were
driven
out. Furthermore, Israel has a deep tradition, and Biblical roots for
Jews. The Wailing Wall is a good example of these roots. They also had
significant financial aid from the United States for the relocation and
rebuilding effort. What tradition does the Andes, especially the
valley of the Andes Mountains , have for Negroes?

And I assert at this time that once again we must reaffirm our belief
in building a democratic society, in which blacks and whites can live
together as brothers, where we will all come to see that integration is
not a problem, but an opportunity to participate in the beauty of
diversity.

The problem is deep. It is gigantic in extent, and chaotic in detail.
And I do not believe that it will be solved until there is a kind of
cosmic discontent enlarging in the bosoms of people of good will all
over
this nation.

There are certain technical words in every academic discipline which
soon become stereotypes and even clichés. Every academic discipline has
its technical nomenclature. You who are in the field of psychology have
given us a great word. It is the word maladjusted. This word is
probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is a good word;
certainly it is good that in dealing with what the word implies you are
declaring that destructive maladjustment should be destroyed. You are
saying that all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid
neurotic
and schizophrenic personalities.

But on the other hand, I am sure that we will recognize that there are
some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we
should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must
always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never
adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We
must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust
ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to
give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness
of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

In a day when Sputniks, Explorers and Geminies are dashing through
outer space, when guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of
death
through the stratosphere, no nation can finally win a war. It is no
longer a choice between violence and nonviolence, it is either
nonviolence
or nonexistence. As President Kennedy declared, 'Mankind must put an
end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.' And so the alternative
to
disarmament, the alternative to a suspension in the development and
use of nuclear weapons, the alternative to strengthening the United
Nations and eventually disarming the whole world, may well be a
civilization
plunged into the abyss of annihilation. Our earthly habitat will be
transformed into an inferno that even Dante could not envision.

Creative maladjustment.

Thus, it may well be that our world is in dire need of a new
organization, The International Association for the Advancement of
Creative
Maladjustment. Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet
Amos,
who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words
that echo across the centuries, 'Let justice roll down like waters and
righteousness like a mighty stream'; or as maladjusted as Abraham
Lincoln, who in the midst of his vacillations finally came to see that
this
nation could not survive half slave and half free; or as maladjusted as
Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to
slavery, could scratch across the pages of history, words lifted to
cosmic
proportions, '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. And that among these are life, liberty, and the
pursuit
of happiness.' And through such creative maladjustment, we may be able
to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to
man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

I have not lost hope. I must confess that these have been very
difficult days for me personally. And these have been difficult days for
every civil rights leader, for every lover of justice and peace.

Copyright 1967 by Martin Luther King Jr. Copyright renewed 1994 by
Coretta Scott King. Reprinted by permission by the heirs to the estate
of
Martin Luther King, Jr., care of Writers' House as agents for the
proprietors.