Martin Luther King Jr.: The Three Evils of Society Speech

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026.  It is a day to reflect upon his life, leadership, and work on behalf of the Civil Rights Movement. Last year, we published an article outlining the numerous milestones Dr. King achieved and pointing out what we considered a poor decision: having the Harrison Public School open on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a Federal Holiday. 

This year, we reflect on Dr. King’s “The Three Evils of Society” speech, also known as the “Beyond Vietnam” speech.  You can listen to the speech on YouTube by clicking on the video below.  If the link does not work, you can access it through this link.

Transcript of the Speech

We are providing a transcript of the speech for those who want to read along while listening.  Here is the transcript.  We would love if you left your thoughts on the speech in our Community Discussion Board.

Mr. Chairman, friends and brothers in this first gathering of the National Conference on New Politics, ladies and gentlemen, can you hear me in the back? I don't know if the Klan is in here tonight or not with all the trouble we're having with these microphones. And seldom, if ever, has, we're still working with it.

As I was about to say, seldom, if ever, has such a diverse and truly ecumenical gathering convened under the aegis of politics in our nation and I want to commend the leadership of the National Conference on New Politics for all of the great work that they have done in making this significant convention possible. Indeed, by our very nature, we affirm that something new is taking place on the American political horizon

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We have come here from the dusty plantations of the deep south and the depressing ghettos of the north. We have come from the great universities and the flourishing suburbs. We have come from Appalachian poverty and from conscience-stricken wealth. But we have come. And we have come here because we shared a common concern for the moral health of our nation.

We have come because our eyes have seen through the superficial glory and glitter of our society and observed the coming of judgment. Like the prophet of old, we have read the handwriting on the wall. We have seen our nation weighed in the balance of history and found wanting.

We have come because we see this as a dark hour in the affairs of men. For most of us, this is a new mood. We are traditionally the idealists. We are the marchers from Mississippi and Selma and Washington who staked our lives on the American dream during the first half of this decade. Many assemble here campaigned assiduously for Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Because we could not stand idly by and watch our nation contaminated by the 18th century policies of Goldwaterism, we were the hardcore activists who were willing to believe that Southerners could be reconstructed in the constitutional image. We were the dreamers of a dream, that dark yesterdays of man's inhumanity to man would soon be transformed into bright tomorrows of justice.

Now it is hard to escape the disillusionment of betrayal. Our hopes have been blasted and our dreams have been shattered. The promise of a great society was shipwrecked. Off the coast of Asia, on the dreadful peninsula of Vietnam, the poor black and white, the poor black and white are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

What happens to a dream deferred? It leads to bewildering frustration and corroding bitterness. I came to see this in a personal experience here in Chicago last summer, and all the speaking that I have done in the United States before varied audiences, including some hostile whites. The only time that I have ever been booed was one night in our regular weekly mass meeting by some angry young men of our movement.

I went home that night with an ugly feeling. Selfishly, I thought of my sufferings and sacrifices over the last twelve years. Why would they boo one so close to them? But as I lay awake thinking, I finally came to myself. And I could not for the life of me have less impatience and understanding for those young men. For twelve years, I and others like me had held out radiant promises of progress.

I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not-too-distant day when they would have freedom all here and now. I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. And their hope came. Their hearts had soared. They were now booing me because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful.

They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare. This situation is all the more ominous in view of the rising expectations of men the world over. The deep rumblings that we hear today, the rumbling of discontent, is the thunder of disinherited masses rising from dungeons of oppression to the bright hills of freedom.

All over the world, like a fever, freedom is spreading in the widest liberation movement in history. The great masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and lands. And in one majestic chorus, they are singing in the words of our freedom song, ain't gonna let nobody turn us around. 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 of 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 bipartisan 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 begin 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. Even when the people persist and in the face of great obstacles develop indigenous leadership and self-help approaches to their problems and finally tread the forest of bureaucracy to obtain existing government funds, the corrupt political order seeks to crush even this beginning of hope. The case of CDGM in Mississippi is the most publicized example, but it is a story repeated many times across our nation. Our own experience here in Chicago is especially painful at present.

After an enthusiastic approval by HEW's Department of Adult Education, SCLC began an adult literacy project to aid 1,000 young men and women who have been pushed out of overcrowded ghetto schools in obtaining basically literacy skills prerequisite to receiving jobs.

We had an agreement with A&P Storrs for 750 jobs through SCLC's job program, Operation Breadbasket, and had recruited over 500 pupils the first week. At that point, Congressman Kuczynski and the Daily Machine intervened and demanded that Washington cut off our funds or channel them through the machine control poverty program in Chicago.

Now we have no problem with administrative supervision, but we do have a desire to be independent of machine control and the Democratic Party patronage network for this desire for a politically independent approach to the needs of our brothers. Our funds are being stopped as of September 15th and a very meaningful program discontinued.

Yes, the hour is dark. Evil comes forth in the guise of good. It is a time of double talk when men in high places have a high blood pressure of deceptive rhetoric and an anemia of concrete performance.

We cry out against welfare handouts to the poor, but generously approve an oil depletion allowance to make the rich richer. Six Mississippi plantations receive more than a million dollars a year not to plant cotton, but no provision is made to feed the tenant farmer who is put out of work by the government subsidy.

The crowning achievement in hypocrisy must go to those staunch Republicans and Democrats of the Midwest and West who were given land by our government when they came here as immigrants from Europe. They were given education through the land-grant colleges. They were provided with agricultural agents to keep them abreast of farming trend. They were granted low-interest loans to aid in the mechanization of their farm.

And now that they have succeeded in becoming successful, they are paid not to farm. And these are the same people who now say to black people whose ancestors were... brought to this country in chains. and who were emancipated in 1863 without being given land to cultivate a bread to eat, that they must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. What they truly advocate is socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

I wish that I could say that this is just a passing phase in the cycle of our nation's life. Certainly times of war, times of reaction throughout the society. But I suspect that we are now experiencing the coming to the surface of a triple-pronged sickness that has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning. That is the sickness of racism, excessive materialism, and militarism.

Not only is this our nation's dilemma, it is the plague of Western civilization. As early as 1906, W.E.B. Du Bois prophesied that the problem of the 20th century will be the problem of the color line. Now as we stand two-thirds into this crucial period of history, we know full well that racism is still that hound of hell which dogs the tracks of our civilization.

Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between cells, a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she madly practiced the antithesis of democracy.

This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backwards simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice, to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unified, and determined thrust. For more information visit www.fema.org, to make justice a reality for afro-americans the step backward has a new name today it is called. the white backlash but the white backlash is nothing new it is the surfacing of old prejudices hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there it was caused neither it was caused neither by the cry of black power nor by the unfortunate reach recent wave of riots in our cities the white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the.black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation. this does not imply that all white Americans are racist far from it many white people have through a deep moral compulsion fought long and hard for racial justice nor does it mean that america has made no progress in her attempt to cure the body politic of the disease of racism or that the dogma of racism has not been considerably modified in recent years however for the good of america it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country even today is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists racism can well be a corrosive evil.

That will bring down the curtain on Western civilization. Arnold Tornby has said that some 26 civilizations have risen upon the face of the earth. Almost all of them have descended into the junk heaps of destruction. The decline and fall of these civilizations, according to Tornby, was not caused by external invasions, but by internal decay. They failed to respond creatively to the challenges impinging upon them.

If America does not respond creatively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men. ###

The speech continues.  You can listen to the entire speech in the video linked above.  Leave us your thoughts in our Community Discussion Board.

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