And I do not plan to cooperate with evil at any point

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/07/0313210

This quote comes from a speech Dr. King gave on January 14, 1968. He had visited Joan Baez and her mother in jail and he gave the speech outside the Santa Rita jail in California afterwards.

“And I do not plan to cooperate with evil at any point. Somebody said to me not too long ago,

“ ‘Dr. King don’t you think you are hurting your leadership by taking a stand against the war in Viet Nam? Aren’t people who once respected you going to loose respect for you? And aren’t you hurting the budget of your organization?’

“And I had to look at that person and say,

"get a clue Democratic senators and representitives" SLaD says


“‘I am sorry sir, you don’t know me. I am not a consensus leader. And I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or by taking a Gallup poll of the majority opinion. Ultimately a genuine leader is not a of consensus but a molder of consensus.’

“On some positions cowardice asks the question, ‘is it safe?’

“Expediency asks the question, ‘is it is politic?’

“Vanity asks the question, ‘is it is popular?’

“But conscience asks the question, ‘is it right?’

“There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. And that is where I stand today and that is where I hope you will continue to stand so that we can speed up the day when justice will roll down like waters all over the world and righteousness like a mighty stream. And we will speed up the day when men will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and nations will not rise up against nations neither they will not start a war anymore and I close by saying as we sing in the old Negro spiritual,

“I ain’t going to study war no more.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and Singer Joan Baez in a Special On Civil Disobedience: Baez Recalls When King Visited Her in Prison, and We Play a Rare Recording of King's Remarks to Supporters Outside the Prison