Martin Luther King's Last Essay
“A New Sense of Direction” (1968, excerpts)
In his final essay "A Sense of a New Direction," Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrates profound empathy towards the radicalism and ideology of young people. He acknowledges their genuine frustrations and understands their disillusionment with a society that often falls short of its ideals. King sees their radicalism not as unfounded rebellion but as a response to deeply ingrained societal flaws, reflecting a generation’s moral outrage and desire for justice. While he fears the potential for destructive tendencies if not guided properly, King offers constructive criticism and a roadmap for channeling youthful energy into positive action, urging non-violence and systemic change through strategic efforts.
Despite his concerns, King’s essay is imbued with optimism about the potential of young people to drive meaningful change. He believes in their capacity for creative and transformative action, seeing in them the seeds of a new social order. King highlights the possibility of synthesizing the best insights from different youth groups – the vision of peace from the hippies, the urgency and direct action of the radicals, and the constructive engagement of those adapting to society. His balanced approach of empathy, fear, constructive criticism, and optimism remains a powerful reminder of the importance of guiding youthful energy and idealism towards constructive and transformative social change.
Today, we witness a resurgence of youth radicalism, echoing the fervor and disillusionment of King's era. As young people grapple with climate change, systemic racism, attacks on women and the LGBTQ community, a US-backed genocide in Gaza, economic inequality, and a resurgent far-right, their actions reflect a profound dissatisfaction with the status quo. They march, organize, and often clash with the establishment, embodying the same "joy in action" that Hannah Arendt described. This moment, much like King's, is defined by a generational imperative to enact change, driven by a moral clarity that refuses to accept the world as it is.
Here are some excerpts from King’s 1968 essay:
Since young people will have to play a great role in the kind of program I have rather sketchily outlined, let me say a few words about the mood of American youth. This is important for many reasons, for the mood of youth is part of the mood of the nation in general. Under the impact of social forces unique to their times young people have splintered into three principal groups.
The largest group of young people is struggling to adapt itself to the prevailing values of our society. Without much enthusiasm they accept the system of government, the economic relationships of the property system, and the social stratifications our system engenders. Even so, they are a profoundly troubled group and are harsh critics of the status quo. In this largest group social attitudes are not congealed or determined, they are fluid and searching. Though recent studies point to the war in Vietnam as their focus of concern, most of them are not ready to resist the draft or to take clear-cut stands on issues of violence and non-violence. But their consciences have been touched by the feeling that is growing all over the world of the horror and insanity of war. They sense the imperative need to respect life and the urgency of moving past war as a way to solve international problems.
There is a second group of young people, presently small in number but dynamic and growing. They are the radicals. They range from moderate to extreme in the degree to which they want to alter the social system. All of them agree that only by structural change can current evils be eliminated because the roots are in the system rather than in man or in faulty operations. This is a new breed of radicals. Very few adhere to any established ideology or dogma: Some borrow from old doctrines of revolution, but practically all of them suspend judgment on what the form of the new society must be. They are in serious revolt against old values and have not yet concretely formulated the new ones. They are not repeating previous revolutionary doctrines. Most of them have not even read the revolutionary classics. Ironically, their rebellion comes from having been frustrated in seeking change within the framework of the existing society. They tried to build racial equality and met tenacious and vicious opposition. They worked to end the Vietnam war and experienced futility.
In their concern for higher social values they were thwarted by a combination of material abundance and spiritual poverty that stifled a pure creative outlook. And so they seek a fresh start with new rules in a new order. It is fair to say that at present they know what they don’t want rather than what they want. Their radicalism grows because the power structure of today is unrelenting in defending not only its social system but the evils it contains.
What is the attitude of this second, radical, group to the problem of violence? In a word, I think it is mixed. There are young radicals today who are pacifists, and there are many armchair revolutionaries who insist on the political and psychological need for violence. These young theorists of violence elaborately scorn the process of dialogue in favor of the tactic of confrontation. They glorify the guerrilla movement, and especially its new martyr, Che Guevara. But across the spectrum of attitudes toward violence that can be found among the radicals is there a unifying thread? Whether they read Gandhi or Fanon, all the radicals understand the need for action — direct, self-transforming and structure-transforming action. This may be their most creative collective insight.
The young people in the third group are sometimes called hippies. They are struggling to disengage from society and to give expression to their rejection of it. They disavow responsibility to organize society. Unlike the radicals, they are not seeking change but flight. When occasionally they merge with a peace demonstration, it is not to better the political world but to give expression to their own world. The hard-core hippie is a remarkable contradiction. He uses drugs to turn inward, away from reality, to find peace and security. Yet he advocates love as the highest human value; love, which can exist only in communication between people, not in the isolation of the individual.
The hippies cannot survive as a mass group because there is no solution in escape. Most of them will regroup, either joining the radicals or drifting back into the mainstream. Some of them may persist by solidifying into a secular religious sect. Their movement already has many such characteristics. We might see some of them establish utopian colonies like the seventeenth and eighteenth-century communities established by sects that profoundly opposed the existing order and its values. Those communities did not survive, but they were important because their dream of social justice and human value continues as the dream of mankind. In this context one dream of the hippie group is very significant, and that is its dream of peace. Most of the hippies are pacifists, and a few have thought their way through to a persuasive and psychologically sophisticated peace strategy. Society at large may now be more ready to learn from that dream than it was a century or two ago; it may listen to the argument for peace, not as a dream but as a practical possibility, something to choose and use.
From this quick tour of the three main groupings of our young people it should be evident that this generation is in spiritual ferment. Even the large group that is not disaffected from society is putting forward basic questions. Their restlessness helps to account for the radicals with their angry protest and the hippies with their systematic withdrawal. All three groups tend to concur in this flippant but profound comment on adult North America by a disenchanted student: “Even if you win a rat race … you are still a rat.”
During the early 1950’s the hangman among the cold war troops was McCarthyism. For years it throttled free expression and intimidated into bleak silence not only liberals and radicals but men in high and protected places. A very small band of courageous people fought back, braving ostracism, slander and loss of livelihood. Gradually and painfully the democratic instinct of Americans was awakened and the ideological brute force was routed. However, McCarthyism left a legacy of social paralysis. Fear persisted for years and social reform remained inhibited and defensive. A blanket of conformity and intimidation conditioned young and old to exalt mediocrity and convention.
The blanket of fear was lifted by the Negro youth of the nation. When they took their struggle to the streets, a new spirit of resistance was born. Inspired by the boldness and ingenuity of Negroes, white youth stirred into action and formed an alliance that aroused the conscience of the nation. It is difficult to exaggerate the creative contribution of dynamic young Negroes of the past eight years. They took non-violent resistance, first employed in Montgomerv, Alabama, in mass dimensions and developed original applications — sit-ins, freedom rides and wade-ins. To accomplish these ends they first transformed themselves. Young Negroes had traditionally imitated whites in dress, conduct and thought in a rigid middle-class pattern. Gunnar Myrdal described them as exaggerated Americans. Now they ceased imitating and began initiating. Leadership passed into the hands of Negroes, and their white allies began learning from them.
This was a revolutionary and wholesome development for both. It is ironic that today so many educators and sociologists are seeking new methods to instill middle-class values in Negro youth as the ideal in social development. It was precisely when young Negroes threw off their middle-class values that they made an historic social contribution. They abandoned those values when they put careers and wealth in a secondary role, when they cheerfully became jailbirds and troublemakers. When they took off their Brooks Brothers attire and put on overalls to work in the isolated rural South, they challenged and inspired white youth to emulate them. Many left school, not to abandon learning but to seek it in more direct ways. They were constructive school dropouts, strengthening society and themselves. These Negro and white youths preceded the conception of the Peace Corps, and I think it is safe to say that their work inspired its organization on an international scale.
Now these years, the late sixties, are a most crucial time for the movements I have been describing. There is a sense in which the alliance of responsible young people which the movement represented has fallen apart under the impact of failures, discouragement, and consequent extremism and polarization. The movement for social change has entered a time of temptation to despair because it is clear now how deep and how systematic are the evils it confronts. There is a strong temptation to despair of programs and actions and to dissipate energy in hysterical talk. There is a temptation to break up into mutually suspicious groups in which blacks reject the participation of whites and whites reject the realities of their own history.
Meanwhile, as the young people face their crisis, we in SCLC must work out programs to bring the social change movements through from their early, and now inadequate, protest phase to a stage of massive, active, non-violent resistance to the evils of the modern corporate society. As this work and planning proceed we begin to glimpse tremendous vistas of what it might mean for the world if the new programs of resistance succeed in forging an even wider alliance of today’s awakened youth.
Non-violent, active resistance to social evils, including massive civil disobedience, can unite, I believe, in a new action that synthesises the best insights of all three groups of young people. From hippies it can accept the vision of peaceful means to a goal of peace, and also their sense of beauty, of gentleness, and of the unique gifts of each man’s spirit. From the radicals it can adopt the burning sense of urgency, the recognition of the need for direct and collective action and the need for strategy and organization.
And because the emerging program is one neither of anarchy nor of despair, it can welcome the work and insights of those young people who have not rejected our present society in its totality. They can challenge the more extreme groups to integrate the new vision into history as it actually is, into society as it actually works. They can help the movement not to break the bruised reed or quench the smoking wick of values that are already recognized in the society we want to change. They can help keep open the possibility of honorable compromise.
As I move out of the stage of analysis and move toward my conclusion, I would like to say a few things that I think are basic if we are going to move creatively in the days ahead. I talked a few minutes ago about the temptation of despair. We all face this temptation in our day-to-day work; there are those moments when we almost feel like giving up. We have all been seared in the flames of withering disappointment.
The Negro’s disappointment is real, part of the daily menu of our lives. In our individual lives we all too often distill our frustrations into an essence of bitterness or drown ourselves in the deep waters of self-pity or adopt a fatalistic philosophy that whatever happens must happen, that all events are determined by necessity. These reactions poison the soul and scar the personality. The only healthy answer is one’s honest recognition of disappointment even as he clings to fragments of hope, the acceptance of finite disappointment while clinging to infinite hope.
We black and poor people who have dreamed for so long of freedom are still confined in a prison of segregation and discrimination. Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? I insist that we shall not — for this can lead to black anger so desperate that it ends in black suicide. Must we turn inward in self-pity? Of course not, for this can lead to a self-defeating black paranoia. Must we conclude that we cannot win? Certainly not, for this will lead to a desperate black nihilism that seeks disruption for disruption’s sake. Must we, by fatalistically concluding that segregation is a foreordained pattern of the universe, resign ourselves to oppression? Of course not, for passively to cooperate with an unjust system makes the oppressed as evil as the oppressor. Our most fruitful course is to stand firm, move forward with aggressive nonviolence, accept disappointments and cling to hope. Our determined refusal not to be stopped will eventually thrust open the door to fulfillment.
In any social revolution there are times when the tail winds of triumph and fulfillment favor us, and other times when strong head winds of disappointment and setbacks beat against us relentlessly. We must not permit adverse winds to overwhelm us as we journey across life’s Atlantic. We must be sustained by energies of courage or engines of courage, in spite of the winds — this refusal to be stopped, this courage to be, this determination to go on in spite of, is the hallmark of great movements. In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise basic questions about our national character. We must ask why are there forty million poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable affluence.
We must ask why has our nation placed itself in the position of being God’s military agent on earth, intervening recklessly in Vietnam and in the Dominican Republic. Why have we substituted the arrogant undertaking of policing the whole world for the high task of putting our own house in order? For its very survival’s sake, America must reexamine old presuppositions and release itself from things that for centuries have been held sacred. For the evils of racism, poverty and militarism to die, a new set of values must be born. Our economy must become more person-centered than property and profit-centered. Our government must depend more on its moral power than on its military power.
Let us, therefore, not think of our movement as one that seeks to integrate the Negro into all the existing values of American society. Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humaneness. We are superbly equipped to do this. We have been scarred in the flames of suffering. We have known the agony of being the underdog. We have learned from our have-not status that it profits a nation little to gain the whole world of means and lose the end, its own soul. We must have a passion for peace born out of the wretchedness of war, giving our ultimate allegiance to the empire of eternity.
We must also be the custodians of creative black power. We must find the positives in black power and not be afraid to affirm that we agree absolutely with these positives. I have said it so often, that our problem in the ghetto is that we are powerless and we must transform this powerlessness into creative power. We are in desperate need to find our identity. We need to be proud of our heritage. We need to be proud of being black and not ashamed of it. But, in seeking our identity, we must seek it honestly. Every man must ultimately confront the question, “Who am I?” and seek to answer it honestly. One of the first principles of personal adjustment is the principle of self-acceptance. The Negro’s greatest dilemma is that in order to be healthy he must accept his ambivalence.
The Negro is a child of two cultures, Africa and America. The problem is that, in the search for wholeness, too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures. Some, seeking to reject their heritage, are ashamed of their color, ashamed of black art and music, and determine what is beautiful and good by the standards of white society. They end up frustrated and without cultural roots. Others seek to reject anything American and to identify totally with Africa, even to the point of wearing African clothes. This approach leads also to frustration because the American Negro is not an African. The old Hegelian synthesis still offers the best answer to many of life’s dilemmas. The American Negro is neither totally African nor totally Western. He is Afro-American, a true hybrid, a combination of two cultures.
Who are we? Let us not be afraid to say it. We are the descendants of slaves. We are the offspring of noble men and women who were kidnapped from their native land and chained in ships like beasts. We are the heirs of a great and exploited continent known as Africa. We are the heirs of rape, fire and murder, and I, for one, am not ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us.
We are also Americans — abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny, is tied up with the destiny of America. And, in spite of the psychological appeals of identification with Africa, the Negro must face the fact that America is now his home, a home that he helped to build through blood, sweat and tears. Since we are American, the solution to our problem will not come through seeking to build a separate black nation within a nation but by finding that creative majority and together moving toward that colorless power that we need for security and justice.
I want now to say something that I’m sure you expect me to say, and that is that we must remain faithful to love and non-violence. I must oppose still any attempt to gain our freedom by methods of malice, hate and violence, by the methods that have characterized our oppressors. Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. It has no boundary lines. I was talking just last evening with some of the young men who have decided to boycott the Olympics.
One of the things that frustrated them more than anything else was the fact that they decided to make their announcement at a black conference in Los Angeles, and they arrived at this meeting only to discover that black people were beating and threatening to murder other black people simply because they wanted to raise some unpopular questions. I said to myself, as I listened, that this more than anything else reveals to me that hate has no limits. I refuse to hate. I have seen hate expressed on the countenances of too many Mississippi and Alabama sheriffs to advise the Negro to sink to this miserable level. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Of course you may say to me: “This is not practical. Life is a matter of getting even, of hitting back, of dog eat dog.” “Maybe in some distant utopia”, you say, “that ideal will work, but not in the hard, cold world in which we live.” My only answer is that mankind has followed the so-called practical way for a long time now, and it has led to deeper confusion and chaos. Time is cluttered with the wreckage of individuals and communities that surrendered to hate and violence.
I’m sure that many of you have read Frantz Fanon’s book The Wretched of the Earth. Toward the end he says: “So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe . . . by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would almost be an obscene caricature. If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe . . . and America into a new Europe, let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted of us. But if we want humanity to advance, to step further, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries.” And then he moves on toward the end to say: “For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrade, we must turn over a new leaf. We must work out new concepts and try to set afoot a new man.”
These are brave and challenging words, and I’m happy that young black men and women are quoting them, but the problem is that Fanon (and those who quote his words) are seeking to work out new concepts and set afoot a new man with the willingness to imitate old concepts of violence. Is there not a basic contradiction here? Violence has been the inseparable twin of materialism — the hallmark of its grandeur. This is the one thing about modern civilization that I do not want to imitate.
Humanity is waiting for something other than a blind imitation of the past. If we want truly to advance a step further, if we want to turn over the new leaf and really set a new man afoot, we must begin to turn mankind away from the long and desolate night of violence. May it not be that the new man the world needs is the non-violent man? Longfellow said: “In this world a man must either be an anvil or the hammer.” We must be hammers shaping a new society rather than anvils molded by the old. This not only will make us new men but will give us a new kind of power. It will not be Lord Acton’s image of power that tends to corrupt, the absolute power that corrupts absolutely. It will be power infused with love and justice that will change dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. I must say to each of you that I have made my decision.
I’m reminded of a story. Centuries ago King Nebuchadnezzar issued an order to all who fell under his domain. That order was that at the sound of the trumpet everyone was to bow before the golden image. The refusal to bow would mean that one would be thrown into the fiery furnace. There were three young men who heard the order. They knew of the injunction, but something deep within them told them that they had to violate the injunction and practice civil disobedience. They stood before the king and said: “We know that the God that we worship is able to deliver us . . . but if not, we will not bow. We know that the power that we have experienced and read about in nature is able to deliver us.
We know that the force who has the power to throw up the gigantic mountains, kissing the skies as if to bathe their peaks in the lofty blue, the power to throw out the stars to bedeck the heavens like swinging lanterns of eternity, also has the power to deliver us . . . but if not, we will not bow.” They were saying that they had discovered something so dear, so precious and so great that they were going to live with it. They had come to say that they were going to do what conscience told them was right. They discovered that ultimately a great faith is not a bargaining faith. It is never an “if” faith, but it is a “though” faith. It doesn’t say, if you do this for me, God, if you do this on that point and that on the other point, then I will serve you; but it goes on to say, “Though he slay me, yet I will trust him.” And the great experiences of life are “though” experiences. Marriage is never a bargaining experience, it’s a “though” experience.