1966
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Redirecting government, solving problems
Tags Share We stand at a new crossroads to an uncertain future. The way ahead is not charted. We know only that it will be full of difficulty and danger. It may seem strange to talk now of new crossroads and new turnings. We are, after all, in the midst of the longest period of…
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Launching the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Effort
Tags Share If men do not build,” asks the poet, “how shall they live?” That [is the] first question millions of men and women all over America ask themselves—ask us—every day; every day of idleness, every “day that follows day, with death the only goal.” That is the question, indeed, of life in the American…
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Solving the Urban Crisis: Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization
Tags Share Each of our cities is now the seat of nearly all the problems of American life: poverty and race hatred, interrupted education and stunted lives, and other ills of the new urban nation—congestion and the filth, danger, and purposelessness which afflict all but the very rich and the very lucky. To speak of…
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Speech at the University of California at Berkeley
Tags Share The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who blend passion, reason, and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and…
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Speech at the University of Mississippi Law School Forum
Tags Share Your generation—South and North, white and black—is the first with the chance not only to remedy the mistakes which all of us have made in the past but to transcend them. Your generation—this generation—cannot afford to waste its substance and its hope in the struggles of the past, for beyond these walls is…
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Speech at the United Auto Workers Regional conference
Tags Share Tonight I want to speak with you not about labor unions, but about the common future of those who labor; about what has too often happened to the great American dream, and about how we can bring new opportunities to millions of Americans. The Americans of whom I speak, however, are not the…
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Speech at the Borough President’s Conference of Community Leaders
Tags Share Since the dawn of their freedom a century ago, Negro Americans have been advised to “cast down your bucket where you are.” But those who offered this advice too often did not bother to look at whether its recipient was standing by a river of opportunity—or in the midst of a desert from…
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Speech at the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York
Tags Share My remarks today are the first in a series of three speeches about one major aspect of the unfinished business that is ahead: the quality of life for the Negro in the urban areas of the North. I do not mean to downgrade the problems that remain in the South. But my purpose…
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