(Vol. 114 No. 1) Text (PDF) - Spelman College: Home

“ You need not nowbow to hate, youneed not now bowto violence, foryou have nowdiscovered anotherway and anotherapproach.”his selfhood and his freedom is at thatmoment committing moral and spiritualsuicide, and you are standing upto the great determination. You havetaken up the deep groans of the century.The students have taken the passionatelongings of the ages andfiltered them in their own souls andfashioned a creative protest. It is one ofthe glowing epics of the time and Ipredict that it will win — that it willhave to win, because this demand is abasic American demand.Victor Hugo said many years ago,“There is nothing more powerful thanan idea whose time has come.” Theidea whose time has come is in theidea of freedom and human dignity.Wherever men are assembled today,whether they are in Johannesburg,Nairobi, Accra, Berlin, Atlanta, NewYork, Montgomery, or Little Rock thecry is always the same: “We want to befree.” And so, today, let men everywherejoin in this quest for freedom bymoving out of the mountain of racialsegregation. This is the mountain thatwe must leave — we have dwelt in itlong enough. On this Founders Day, ifyou forget all I have said. I hope youwon’t forget this mountain.Finally, we have been in the mountainof corroding hatred and cripplingviolence long enough. We have beenin this mountain for centuries becausemen have gone to war and they havefought numerous wars; battlefields ofthe world have been painted withblood. We know about it — we knowabout this mountain because violenceis the inseparable twin of westernmaterialism, the hallmark of itsgrandeur. We know about this mountain,we have been in it long enough. Iam convinced it we fail to move out ofthis mountain, we will be plungedinto the abyss of annihilation. Thismeans not only on the local scale; wemust move out of it on the internationalscale. There was a time whenwe fought wars and felt they were justwars. I must admit that at one point inmy intellectual pilgrimage, I justifiedwar, certainly as a sort of negativegood in the sense that it blocked anevil force, a totalitarian force. I havecome to believe firmly now that warcan no longer serve even as a negativegood because of the potential destructivenessof modern war. There was atime when we had a choice of violenceor nonviolence, but today it is eithernonviolence or nonexistence.And so the nations of the worldmust get together. In Geneva they mustget together; at the Summit Conferencethey must get together, to bringan end to the armament race, to bringabout universal disarmament and setup a sort of world police force. This is amatter of survival now. Talk about loveand nonviolence may have beenmerely a pious injunction a few yearsago; today it is an absolute necessity forthe survival of our civilization.Also in the racial struggle this isvitally important to our nation and toother nations we must come out ofthe mountain of hatred and violence.This is why I am convinced that as westand up for freedom and as we standup for justice we must always strugglewith the highest weapons of dignityand discipline. We must never useweapons of hatred and violence. Menhave thought over the years that eitherthey would have to fight their oppressionsor they would have to acquiesceand surrender. You have seen the typeof people who felt that the only way todeal with oppressions was to accept it.Sometimes you will hear somebodysinging, “been down so long thatdown don’t bother me.” That is howsome people adjust; they get exhaustedin the struggle, and they give up andthey are free — they achieve the freedomof exhaustion. Then others havefelt that the only way to deal withoppression is to stand up with violenceand get ammunition andweapons of violence to deal with anevil system and an evil opponent. Isay to you today, there is another waythat combines the best points of bothof these and avoids the evil points ofboth, and that is what we call nonviolentresistance. For here you havediscovered a way of struggle thatcombines the realistic and the idealistic;a way of struggle that combinesthe calm and courageous. You neednot now bow to hate, you need notnow bow to violence, for you havenow discovered another way andanother approach. It comes to usfrom the long Christian tradition,Jesus of Nazareth himself, comingdown through Mahatma Gandhi ofIndia, who took the love ethic of JesusChrist and made it effective as asociopolitical force and broughtabout the transformation of a greatnation and achieved freedom for hispeople.I know you are asking, “What doyou mean about this love thing —-you are talking about people whooppose you, loving people who are tryingto misuse you, seeking to defeatyou —- what in the world are you tryingto say? That is impossible! Sincethese questions are often raised, I haveto pause quite often to explain themeaning of love in this context. It isinteresting that the Greek languagecomes to our rescue and our aid at thispoint. You know in the Greek languagethere are three words for love. One iseros. Eros is a sort of aesthetic love.Plato talked about it a great deal in hisdialogue, the yearning of the soul forthe realm of the divine. It has come tous to mean a sort of romantic love; inthat sense we all know eros because wehave experienced it and we have livedwith it; we have read about it in all ofthe beauties of literature. I wouldimagine Edgar Allen Poe was talkingabout eros when he talked about hisbeautiful Annabelle Lee with a lovesurrounded by a halo of eternity. In asense Shakespeare was talking aboutEros when he said: “Love is not lovewhich alters when it alteration finds,or bends with the remover toremove: Oh no! it is an ever fixedmark that looks on tempests and isnever shaken. It is the star to every6 S P E L M A N M E S S E N G E R