Poverty
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Press Release—Los Angeles, CA
Tags Share Perhaps the area of our greatest domestic failure is in the system of welfare—public assistance to those in need. There is a deep sense of dissatisfaction, among recipient and government alike, about what welfare has become over the last thirty years, and where it seems to be going. Welfare is many things to…
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Address at Indianapolis, Indiana
Tags Share Crime is an issue that is difficult and dangerous; easily susceptible to illusory and false programs; an issue which threatens to divert us from the road to a better nation into blind alleys of suspicion and mistrust. So let us examine not just the danger of crime but what we can do together…
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Address at Michigan State University
Tags Share At the outset we must make it unmistakably clear: A violent few cannot be permitted to threaten the lives and well-being of the many, not lawless gangs disrupt the peace of our cities and the hopes of their fellows for progress. But history offers cold comfort to those who think grievance and despair…
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Televised Press Conference
Tags Share In the last five or six years, the white people have looked at the black people and said, “Look at all we have done. We passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We passed the [Voting] Rights Act of 1965.” “A Negro has been appointed to the Supreme Court. A Negro has been…
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Speech at the University of Notre Dame
Tags Share This is the most affluent nation the world has ever known. This nation—our nation—has a food—producing capacity unrivaled in this history of the world. Yet in the midst of our great affluence, children—American children—are hungry, some to the point where their minds and bodies are damaged beyond repair. I have seen, in the…
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Presidential campaign speech at Phoenix, Arizona
Tags Share If there is one overriding reality in this country, it is that we must resist any erosion of a sense of national decency. Make no mistake: Decency is at the heart of the matter—and at the heart of this campaign. Poverty is indecent. Illiteracy is indecent. The death or maiming of brave young…
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Address at Vanderbilt University
Tags Share When we are told to forego all dissent and division, we must ask: Who is it that is truly dividing the country? It is not those who call for change; it is those who make present policy who divide our country; those who bear the responsibility for our present course; those who have…
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Address at University of Kansas
Tags Share I have seen these other Americans—I have seen children in Mississippi starving, their bodies so crippled by hunger; and their minds have been so destroyed for their whole life that they will never have no future. I have seen children in Mississippi—here in the United States, with a gross national product of eight…
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The Goals of American Foreign Policy: Columbus Day Dinner
Tags Share The year 1492 symbolizes the three parts of the American experience: our past conquests, our present dangers, and the most spacious of our future hopes. At the same moment that men were flaunting danger to master a primitive continent, the civilization of the world was reaching one of its greatest moments. In the…
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Air pollution control conference
Tags Share On a trip to Latin America last year, I saw people in Recife, in the poorest part of Brazil, who ate crabs which lived off the garbage that the people themselves threw in the shallow water near their shabby homes. And whenever I tell this story to Americans, the reaction is: How sad,…
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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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