I've spoken these words before but not on the radio.
To be born free is to be born in debt.
To live in freedom without fighting slavery.
To profiteer.
I have met Southerners who expect and fear a Negro insurrection.
I see no purpose in withholding this from general discussion.
There may be those within that outcast ten percent of the American people who someday will strike back at their oppressors.
But to put down that mob, a mob would rise.
I'd like to ask, please: who will put down that mob?
I'm an overpaid producer with pleasant reasons to rejoice, and I do.
In the wholesome practicability of the profit system.
But surely, my right to having more than enough is cancelled.
If I don't use that more to help those who have less.
I owe the very profit I make to the people I make it from.
If this is radicalism, it comes automatically to most of us in show business.
It being generally agreed that any public man owes his position to the public.
That's what I mean when I say I'm your obedient servant.
We must, each day, earn what we own.
A healthy man owes to the sick all that he can do for them.
An educated man owes to the ignorant all that he can do for them.
A free man owes to the world's slaves all that he can do for them.
And what is to be done is more, much more, than good works.
Christmas baskets, bonuses and tips, and bread and circuses.
There is only one thing to be done with slaves.
Free them.
If we can't die in behalf of progress, we can live for it.
Progress, we Americans take to mean, a fuller realization of democracy.
The measure of progress, as we understand it, is the measure of equality enjoyed by all men.
We can do something about that.
The way our fighting brothers and sisters looked at it.
Some of them dead as I speak these words.
The way they looked at it, we're lucky.
And they're right, we're lucky to be alive.
But only if our lives make life itself worth dying for.
We must be worthy of our luck or we are damned.
Our lives were spared, but this is merely the silliest of accidents.
Unless we put the gift of life to the hard employments of justice.
If we waste that gift, we won't have anywhere to hide from the indignation of history.
I want to say this.
The morality of the auction block is out of date.
There is no room in the American century for Jim Crow.
Tomorrow's democracy discriminates against discrimination.
Its charter won't include the freedom to end freedom.
Race hate isn't human nature, race hate is the abandonment of human nature.
But this is true.
There are alibis for the phenomenal excuses, economic and social.
But the brutal fact is simply this.
Where the racist lies acceptable, there is corruption.
The race haters must be stopped, the lynchings must be stopped.
The murders must be avenged.
I come in that boy's name and in the name of all, who, in this land of ours, have no voice of their own.
I come with a call for action.
This is the time for it.
I call for action against the cause of riot.
It won't surprise me if I'm accused in some quarters of inciting to riot.
Well, I'm very interested in riots, I'm very interested in avoiding them.
So I call for action against the cause of riots.
Law is the best action, the most decisive.
It's in the people's power to see to it that what makes lynchings and starts wars is dealt with.
Not by well-wishers, but by policemen, and I mean good policemen.
Over several generations, maybe there'll be men who can't be weaned away from the fascist vices of race hate.
But we should deny such men responsibility in public affairs.
Exactly as we deny responsibility to the wretched victims of the drug habit.
There are laws against peddling dope.
There can be laws against peddling race hate.
But every man has the right to his own opinion as an American boasts.
But race hate is not an opinion, it's a phobia.
It isn't a viewpoint, race hate is a disease.
In a people's world, the incurable racist has no rights.
He must be deprived of influence in a people's government.
He must be segregated, as he himself would segregate the colored and semitic peoples.
Anything very big is very simple.
If there's a big race question, there's a big answer to it.
And a big answer is simple, like the word "no".
America can write her name across this century, and so she will.
If we, the people, brown and black and red.
Rise now to the great occasion of our brotherhood.
It will take courage.
It calls for the doing of great deeds, which means the dreaming of great dreams.
Giving the world back to its inhabitants is too big a job for the merely practical.
No one of us will live to see a blameless peace.
We strive and pray and die for what will be here when we're gone.
Our children's children are the ancestors of a free people.
To the generations: the fight is worth it.
And that just about means that my time is up.
When my time's up, I remain as always, obediently yours.