Speech

Commencement Address at Queens College

June 15, 1965

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New York, NY

Around the world—from the Straits of Magellan to the Straits of Malacca, from the Nile delta to the Amazon basin, in Jaipur and Johannesburg—the dispossessed people of the world are demanding their place in the sun. For uncounted centuries, they have lived with hardship, with hunger and disease and fear. For the last four centuries, they have lived under political, economic, and military domination of the West. We have shown them that a better life is possible. We have not done enough to make it a reality.

A revolution is now in progress. It is a revolution for individual dignity, in societies where the individual has been submerged in a desperate mass. It is a revolution for self-sufficiency, in societies which have been forced to rely on more fortunate nations for their manufactured goods and their education, cotton textiles, and calculus texts. It is a revolution to bring hope to their children, in societies where 40 percent of all children die before reaching the age of five. This revolution is directed against us—against the one third of the world that diets while others starve; against a nation that buys eight million new cars a year while most of the world goes without shoes; against developed nations which spend over one hundred billions dollars on armaments while the poor countries cannot obtain the ten to fifteen billion dollars of investment capital they need just to keep pace with their expanding populations…

It is a revolution not just for economic well-being but for social reform and political freedom, for internal justice and international independence.

We should understand the legitimacy of these ideals—for they are only what our own forefathers sought. We should recognize their power—for they have sustained us throughout our history…

We must remember our revolutionary heritage. We must dare to remember what President Kennedy said we could not dare to forget—that we are the heirs of a revolution that lit the imagination of all those who seek a better life for themselves and their children; that we must seize the chance to lead this continuing revolution, not block its path; that we must stand, not for the status quo, but for progress; that we must practice abroad what we preach at home…

The essence of the American Revolution—the principle on which this country was founded—is that direct participation in political activity is what makes a free society.

Freedom, for the founders, was not merely negative, the absence of arbitrary restraints. Freedom for them was active and positive—the power of each individual to take part in the government of the town, the state, the nation. As Jefferson said, “not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day,” every man was to be “a participator in the government affairs.” As time has passed, and society has grown more complex, this tradition has been difficult to maintain…

But the sit-ins and the teach-ins, the summer projects, the civil rights vigils and civil liberties protests, organizing the poor and marching on Washington—all these may be helping to return us to a politics of public participation, where individual citizens, without holding political office, may still contribute to the public dialogue—where they do something more than write letters to the newspaper or answer yes or no on a public opinion poll…

Your activity, moreover, is to be welcomed whether any of us think your opinions are right or not—for we develop truth and policy in the midst of the debate.

But if you are to participate—if you are to help lead this nation—you must use, to the limits of your power, the education you have been given here. This education has taught you the value of facts—and there can be no meaningful politics which is ignorant of the facts. Your education has taught you that undue self-interest is the enemy of truth—and politics is corrupted where selfishness takes precedence over respect for the truth…

Second, you must consider and judge your acts with considerable care, and with a sense of responsibility. For your participation…imposes special obligations.

The Berkeley students of the Free Speech Movement made a contribution to academic freedom and help also to remind universities all over the country that schools are for teaching.

But when a few students turned Free Speech into scrawling of dirty words on placards, they discredited not only themselves by the initial protest…

It is not helpful—it is not honest—to protest the war in Vietnam as if it were a simple and easy question, as if any moral man could reach only one conclusion. Vietnam admits no simple solution. But the complexity and difficulty of any question should not keep you from speech or action.

In 1787, Benjamin Rush said “There is nothing more common than to confound the term of American Revolution with that of the late American War. The American War is over; but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed.”

That is as true today as it was then. For as long as men are hungry, and their children uneducated, and their crops destroyed by pestilence, the American Revolution will have a part to play. As long as men are not free—in their lives and their opinions, their speech and their knowledge—that long will the American Revolution not be finished…