Editor’s note: To commemorate Juneteenth, we share excerpts of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech at Stanford University in April 1967. We hear in this speech many of the themes that would animate King’s career but are too often forgotten: Economic equality and justice, the historical context of white backlash, and optimism as an ethos. The speech has been edited for length.
I’d like to use as a subject from which to speak this afternoon, the other America. And I use this subject because there are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful for our situation. And in a sense, this America is overflowing with the miracle of prosperity and the honey of opportunity. This America is the habitat of millions of people who have food and material necessities for their bodies and culture and education for their minds, and freedom and human dignity for their spirit. In this America, millions of people experience every day the opportunity of having life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in all of their dimensions. And in this America, millions of young people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity.
But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America. This other America has a daily ugliness about it that constantly transforms the buoyancy of hope into the fatigue of despair. In this America, millions of work-starved men walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist. In this America, millions of people find themselves living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums. In this America, people are poor by the millions. And they find themselves perishing on a lonely island of poverty, in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.
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