Ed note. This post was originally published on August 28 for the 50th anniversary of the I Have a Dream Speech.
Today is the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s most famous speech. That speech did not mention the United Nations, but Dr. King was a great supporter of the United Nations, both as an institution and as an ideal. This is from the speech “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,“ which was delivered four days before his assassination.
“It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.”
King also delivered a speech in front of the UN on April 15 1967; and visited the UN in 1964 where he met Ralph Bunche, an African American UN official who won the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize for brokering Arab-Israeli peace talks.
