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Violence is spending $78 billion to kill and only $12 billion to make whole.
Violence is J. Edgar Hoover listening to your telephone conversation; violence is an Assistant Attorney General proposing concentration camps for white and black militants, violence is blowing up two black men and saying they did it themselves.
Violence is 6,000 American farmers receiving $25,000 not to work.
Violence is the Congress of the United States putting cotton, tobacco, rice and cattle ahead of people.
Violence is Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew ignoring the expression of peace of millions of Americans.
But an antidote to that violence exists; the antidote was begun with Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, was given impetus by Dubois and the Niagara Movement; was spurred by Martin Luther Kng, Jr. and thousands of nameless fighters for freedom. It is a movement
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that at times has attracted mass following, but which has all too often been the province of a few.
But movements are not built on the helpful notions of a few, but by the determined actions of the many.
The chance at power comes in this country, not from seizing a dean, but form seizing a welfare office, from organizing a strike of domestic workers, from beginning the process of transferring strength and power [handprinted blue ballpint pen ink]and resources[/handprinted blue ballpint pen ink] from those who have to those who do not.
This is not easy work. It is not easy because no one wants to do it. In an era of doing your own thing, no one wants to do for and with those whose thing is becoming winning and retaining the right to live.
It will require more than just the commitment of summer soldiers, although any soldiers are welcomed into an understaffed army.
It will require serious and systematic allocations of time
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It will require that rhetoric be turned into action, that schoolbook knowledge be turned toward street situations, that theories be turned into practice.
It will require that politics means people and their problems and not just elections and candidates.
It will require that we build a movement strong enough to take over in a peaceful and orderly fashion, or to take control, following the example of those who now exercise control.
It will require that energies are directed toward proper goals, and will require that men and women refuse to be diverted by fights on the edge of the main struggle.
The fight against racism, imperialism and war cannot be diverted by campus rallies against unclean air - the same men who enslave millions of black people also poison the air. The system
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which build cars that are no good when they are two years old is the same system that builds no jobs and no homes for men. The same people who dump industrial garbage into the water are also building and dumping bombs on Vietnam.
When they are successfully brought to task on the one basic issue - man's exploitation of his fellowman - they will be brought to task on all of the others.
That suggests there will be no peace. The oppressed of this land will not let peace prevail, until they are given power or until they are destroyed by it.
When the day of judgment comes, we shall each have to add up our marks. Those who sat idly by and did nothing until that day will be the first to go.
But it will eventually consume us all. As the old spiritual says, "God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time."
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what is needed is a new kind of commitment.
In our terms, it means the kind of commitment from young people that would have kept the South in ferment from the heady days of 1964 until the present; it is the kind of commitment that takes over the dean's office one day, but the welfare office the next; the kind of commitment that will mean year round participation in a new politics, a people's politics, a politics that will insure a choice, and not an echo, at the top of the ballot in November 1972.
And it will require that each of us keep in mind a prophecy written by the late Langston Hughes, - that dreams deferred do explode. For if this dream is deferred much longer, then an explosion will come.
Dr. W. E. B. DuBois' belief that the problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line was later restated to include the problem of those who have not pitted against those who have.