
1960s, Address to Cornell College (1962)
1960s, Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution (1965)
1960s, Address to Cornell College (1962)
"Social Justice and the Emerging New Age" address at the Herman W. Read Fieldhouse, Western Michigan University (18 December 1963)
1960s
1950s, Give Us the Ballot (1957)
Context: We must not seek to use our emerging freedom and our growing power to do the same thing to the white minority that has been done to us for so many centuries. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man. We must not become victimized with a philosophy of black supremacy. God is not interested merely in freeing black men and brown men and yellow men, but God is interested in freeing the whole human race. We must work with determination to create a society, not where black men are superior and other men are inferior and vice versa, but a society in which all men will live together as brothers and respect the dignity and worth of human personality.
Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 139
Context: For me, and probably for all of us, the concept of a personal, interested god can be appealing, often deeply so. In times of sorrow or despair, I often wonder what it would be like to be able to pray to God or Allah or Jehovah or Mary and believe that I was heard, believe that my petition might be answered. When I sing the hymns of faith in Jesus' love, I am drawn to their intimacy, their allure, their poetry. But in the end, such faith is simply not available to me. I can’t do it. I lack the resources to render my capacity for love and my need to be loved to supernatural Beings. And so I have no choice but to pour these capacities and needs into earthly relationships, fragile and mortal and difficult as they often are.
“We will now sing forth, hymn 405, 'Oh God, what on earth is my hairdo all about?”
“I am yours. If you feed me garbage,
I will sing a song of garbage.
This is a hymn.”
"Pig Song" http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=21982
Selected Poems 1965-1975 (1976)
2014, Queensland University Address (November 2014)
2010s, 2015, Speech on (20 July 2015)
“I would give to all men, of every clime and race, of every faith and creed, freedom and equality”
As quoted in Colored Patriots of the American Revolution https://books.google.com/books?id=Jy8OAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107 (1855), by William Cooper Nell, p. 107
Speech (June 1853)
Context: A colored battalion was organized for the defense of New Orleans, and General Jackson publicly thanked them for their courage and conduct. When the country has required their blood in days of trial and conflict, they have given it freely, and we have accepted it. But, in times of peace, when their blood is not needed, we spurn and trample them under foot. I have no part in this great wrong to a race. Wherever and whenever we have the power to do it, I would give to all men, of every clime and race, of every faith and creed, freedom and equality before the law. My voice and my voice shall ever be given for the equality of all of the children of men before the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States.