1960s, The American Promise (1965)
Context: For Negroes are not the only victims. How many white children have gone uneducated, how many white families have lived in stark poverty, how many white lives have been scarred by fear, because we have wasted our energy and our substance to maintain the barriers of hatred and terror? So I say to all of you here, and to all in the Nation tonight, that those who appeal to you to hold on to the past do so at the cost of denying you your future. This great, rich, restless country can offer opportunity and education and hope to all: black and white, North and South, sharecropper and city dweller. These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are the enemies and not our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too, poverty, disease and ignorance, we shall over, come.
“The means are at hand to fulfill the age-old dream: poverty can now be abolished. How long shall we ignore this underdeveloped nation in our midst? How long shall we look the other way while our fellow human beings suffer? How long?”
Source: The Other America (1962), p. 170
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Michael Harrington 17
American political writer 1928–1989Related quotes
Speech on the steps of the State Capitol Building, Montgomery, Alabama (25 March 1965), as transcribed from a tape recording; reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989), which states that this speech was not reported in its entirety.
1960s
Political Science for Civil Services Main Examination (2010)
Excerpts from a speech at the launch of the NAP, 8 April 2005
“How shall we venture home?
How shall we tell each other of the poet?”
"The Gates"
The Gates (1976)
Context: How shall we venture home?
How shall we tell each other of the poet?
How can we meet the judgment on the poet,
or his execution? How shall we free him? How shall we speak to the infant beginning to run?
All those beginning to run?
The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah