The Negro Revolt Revisited 
	Louis Lomax
	Delivered 22 October 1965 
	Skinner Memorial Chapel 
	Carleton College
	Northfield, Minnesota

I am particularly indebted to
President Nason for this short kind
introduction. When one lectures four
and five times a week, as I do, he
develops a deep hatred for introducers,
for they're prone to get up and wax
long and bold, and they succeed in
confusing themselves with the speaker
and they confuse the speaker with
God almighty.

I am always filled with a little touch
of nostalgia when I come back to the
university campus for it not only
reminds me of my wonderful years as a
student and in the halls of academia,
but also of my years, as a professor,
during which I labored under the
terrible and mistaken assumption that
I could teach. And under the even more
egregious assumption that students
could learn.

But in either eventuality, I never
come back to a college campus without a
sense of - something of a lump - in my
throat. And this is particularly true,
I think, during these transitional
years, when so much is occurring. And I
shall attempt this morning to sustain
the thesis that the phenomenon I have
called the Negro Revolt is in reality,
a minor symptom of major, much broader
changes, sweeping particularly our
civilization, and in a general sense
the world. In order to revisit the
Negro Revolution, to assess where
it finally now is and where it is
going and why and what it means,
it is necessary to, instead of going
forward, literally go back, go back
historically, particularly when you're
talking to white students, because they
don't know any American history. It's
necessary to go back and reassemble the
socioeconomic mosaic that is America.

And remember again, and for most
of you, perhaps for the first time,
precisely how we arrive at the pickle
we are in. And then I think once we
can understand it historically and
get some of the moral implications of
this history to work for us, perhaps we
can plot some sane suggestions for the
days just ahead. This country for all
intents and purposes, to read history
with some fairness and honesty, was
founded by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant
males.

You girls don't get a break either as
you will find out.  Men who, again if
you are going to read them literally,
loved God and walked day by day with
Jesus and were consistently in pursuit
of Liberty and freedom of religious
worship. Well, obviously they were
concerned really only with their own
individual freedom and with their right
to worship their God.

And they certainly weren't concerned
with my individual freedom and your
right to worship your God.

But on the whole, they were a rather
lazy lot. And America was a rather big,
expansive land. And there, they stood
on the coast of New England as it were,
looking out over all of America and
before them, they could see the cotton
to be picked, the potatoes to be hoed,
the peanuts to be harvested. And
somebody had to lift that barge and
tote that bale, and these brethren
were indeed too involved with loving
the Lord to do this.

And they just weren't about to do
this. And they said, now we've got
to have somebody who can do the hard,
the dirty work to get this thing going,
while we love the Lord and, you know,
kind of write things. And they looked
around them and somebody said, well,
there is the Indian who has graciously
donated this land to us. We see it's
communist inspired to say we took it.

And they said, well he is a
barbarian. And so,  why don't we
put him in indentured servitude
and let him lift the barge and tote
the bale and do the dirty work. And
they proceeded to put the Indian in
indentured servitude and the Indian
proceeded to stage the first sit-in
in human history. He simply moved
over under a tree and sat down and
he would light his pipe. And that was
the end of that, and he wouldn't work.
Well, of course they could kill him,
but a dead Indian couldn't really hoe
potatoes and pick cotton.

And this became something of an
economic disaster. And it was at this
juncture that it occurred to them that,
well now maybe what we really should
do, is what the Americans in California
are going to do with the Mexicans 500
years from now. We can send back to
Europe, and get our white brothers and
sisters from Northern Europe.

See, they are white like us. And we
can bring them over and we'll pay
their boat fare. And we'll put them in
indentured servitude. And while we are
serving the Lord and doing all these
other things, let them lift the barge
and tote the bale. And as a result of
this policy, you get thousands of, of
course it's very important, Northern,
the right types, of Europeans, coming
into America to live in indentured
servitude. And of course they were
the first to really begin to hoe the
potatoes and work the peanut crop. But
there was one major fallacy, young
people, in this economic plan: you see,
all white people look alike.

And this produced a major problem
because once the white fellows got
here from Northern Europe, they worked
until they made one payday. Then they
would come into town to places like
Northfield and other places and mingled
with free white people. And there
was no way for the white plantation
owner to prove that this white man
was indeed his bond servant. And so
they ran away and the whole thing
became an economic disaster. So they
had to abandon that. And it was then
that they really began to take counsel
among themselves and to say, now, look,
we've got to get somebody here to do
this work.  We are not going to do it.

And there are two prerequisites. This
person must have. One, he must be
able to swing with this hot sun in
Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and
Georgia. And secondly, he must have a
high degree of social visibility. So
if he runs away, you see, we can find
him and bring him back. And it was
that combination. And precisely that
combination of socioeconomic factors
that caused, and this is the precise
name of it, the good ship Jesus to set
sail from Liverpool and move toward
the coast of West Africa.

And you and Martin Luther King have
been inextricably involved from
that day on. But that is a cultural
historical point that I need to nail
down for you at this juncture, because
it's going to explain something else
later. During what we call the middle
passage - and read Herskovits Myth
of the Negro Past on this - during
the middle passage from Africa to
America, the black men who had been
sold to white men by other black men,
were jammed in the holes of ships like
sardines, but they had been bought
from various states on the coast of
West Africa.

And not only from various states,
but from various tribes within various
states. Ergo, during the passage from
Africa to America, in most instances,
the black men couldn't even talk to
each other. For they had, neither
language nor religion, nor folkways,
nor mores in common. Now this is going
to turn out to be a major point in
modern social history.

And so America then is flooded between
1619, the next hundred or so years,
with slaves.

They began as indentured servants, and
then over a period of a half a century,
they sink down, down, down, and finally
into chattel slavery. Now let's look at
the man who is holding the slaves. Now
this is the same, Anglo-Saxon white
Protestant who loves the Lord. Remember
him? He's the fellow. And he looks
at himself and here is this righteous
man who not only burns witches at the
stake, but will take a branding iron
and stamp the scar of adulteress across
the breast of an erring woman.

This is how much he loves God, you
see. He's got slaves and this is
a problem.

And he says to himself, indeed
there was quite a bit of controversy
about it, how can we as a Christian
God-fearing people put other human
beings in slavery. And the preacher
said, as he does today, don't worry
about it. Come to church Sunday,
bring money, we'll fix it. And so you
get this New England tableau now on
Sunday morning where the minister dips
into the writings of Paul and he says,
slave obey your master in the Lord for
this is right.

And he sets up a sociological
hierarchy, which parallels his
theological hierarchy, in which the
relationship of the slave to his
master, is precisely that of the
Christian to Christ, and the slave
no more questions the master, than
the Christian questions Christ. And
then he nails it all to rest with the
proposition, that it is quite good
and quite holy and quite right, for
a Christian to enslave another man,
so long as that man himself is not
a Christian.

In other words, God doesn't care if
you enslave a barbarian, it's only if
you enslave another Christian. And of
course there I was, quite barbaric and
slavery became justified. So there I am
now, I am in America.  At long last,
I have begun to talk to my fellow
Africans because we have both learned
English.

When day is done, my hands are tired
and bleeding from the cotton thorns,
my feet are tired, my back stings
from the feel of the whip. And all I
want to do at the end of the day is
to go to my back end of the plantation
and perhaps build me a fire and do my
African tribal dance.  But this white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant couldn't leave
me alone.

The reality of it was, I had more
gods going for me out on the back
end of that plantation, than he had
going for him. I had pantheism. I had
animism. I had a god for the wind,
a god for the lightning, a god for
the wind, a god for the storm, a god
for the thunder, a god for the lake, a
god for the ocean, a god for the rock,
a god for the mountain. I had gods all
over the place, but he couldn't leave
to me alone, when day was done he had
to come and bug me about Jesus.

He couldn't leave me alone. Lomax. Yes,
sir. What is it now? You know,
I like, I don't want to see you
baby until tomorrow morning. I've
done all I'm going to do now. And
he says, no Lomax. You've got to put
down your barbaric religion. What's
barbaric about my religion? Well, it's
illogical. But what's illogical about
my religion? Well, it happens to be
illogical to believe that God is in
a rock. You need to come to believe
that God was born to a virgin. This
makes sense.

But the other thing doesn't, you see?
But it was really, I believe, when he
said, then promised me, that Jesus
would indeed wash me whiter than
snow. I think that did it. Anything
that would literally improve my
self-image, that would lift me out of
this hell hole of self hate that I had
been immersed in, as a result of my
being immersed in slavery.

Anything that would whiten me up. So
I become a Christian. Then he's really
got a problem. When you see his whole
moral rationale has been built upon the
fact that I was a barbarian. Now he has
come and converted me to Christ. Now,
how can he, as a Christian, justify
my slavery? And those of you who are
interested in theology, these are
the roots of American theology we are
dealing with now. And so he faces this
new dilemma and the preacher said, as
he always does, don't worry about it,
come to church Sunday, bring money,
we'll fix it.

And so you get this New England Cotton
Mather tableau now on Sunday morning
of the puritanical rock-ribbed,
Anglo-Saxon, Protestant minister,
his locks flying in the wind and he
has his picture painted now. The flood
is receding. The ark settles on Mount
Ararat and Noah - see if Noah had
looked into my African Lord, I could
have told him those berries would do
things to him, but he didn't believe
that either.

So now Noah is drunk. Two of his
sons want to cover him up. And one of
them laughed at him. I watched this
because you see only, young people,
in the ethically contorted Anglo-Saxon
Protestant morality drama, could the
bad man wake up from a drunk and put
a curse on the good man. And this is
precisely what happened. You see,
Noah wakes up and he looks at Ham,
who's laughed at him. And he said,
henceforth, your children shall be
hewers of wood and drawers of water
for the sons and daughters of all my
other children.

And then the preacher said, you
see that nigger Lomax out there,
hewing wood and drawing water on the
plantation? And they said, amen. He
said, well, that is Noah's son through
him. That is the child of Ham. And the
Negro is made by God, morally inferior.

And there's nothing the Negro can
do. Neither super suds, nor going to
Yale, nothing the Negro can do will
relieve him of this image stigma of
moral inferiority. And so it becomes
a fundamental plank in the American
theological platform that it's all
right to keep Lomax in slavery because
he's a moral inferior. Now, of course
you don't hear much about that in
enlightened church circles today, it's
like having an idiot aunt who was about
102 years old.

You keep her locked up in the
attic and all of those who were
of her generation, they knew that
somebody crazy lived upstairs, they
are dead. And you keep her up there in
hopes that none of your contemporaries,
you see, will find out that you've
got an aunt who's a nut, you know,
who's upstairs in the attic. But it
still remains fundamental in American
theological thinking.

And this of course accounts precisely
for the Ku Klux Klan. When they say
they're serving God, they're doing
precisely what the church has taught
them to do. And if you really want
to see it, of course, in the church
that is honest about it, you look at
the Mormons and they'll tell you point
blank that yes, the Negro is the son of
Ham. And God has said that the Negro
is inferior and we're sorry about it,
but this is way it is. And you suddenly
realize the number of Mormons who have
come to power in public life and who
are committed to the proposition is
20 million American Negroes are born
morally inferior.

I remember during the Republican
convention of 1964, I was in San
Francisco and Governor Romney was
then, as he is now, running for the
presidency. And as you know, he's a
senior elder in the Mormon Church and
governor of the state of Michigan,
presiding over the black belt of
Detroit, where I suspect the next race
riot will come from.

And every Sunday morning Romney goes to
church and reaffirms the proposition
that 20 million American Negroes
are born morally inferior, doomed by
God, to this. And I said to one of
Mr. Romney's aides, how in the world
can a public figure of the stature
and the dignity and the intelligence
and the promise of Governor Romney
adhere to this kind of theological
nonsense? And he said, Mr. Lomax,
that's the governor's religion, but
he doesn't believe it. I said, well,
that fits. And I said, well, aren't you
Mormons disturbed by it? He says, yes,
we are disturbed by it.

We are anguished by it. And he looked
at me and he said, and we're so sorry
for you because of it. He said, and
we just don't know what to do. This is
what God said. This is the way God made
it. And we liberal Mormons are sitting
around just hoping and praying that God
will speak and that he will change this
thing.   And all during the convention,
I sat in the press gallery praying
to my God, that the Republicans would
indeed nominate George Romney. For you
see, I had the sneaking suspicion that
if the Republicans had nominated George
Romney at 10:30, God would have indeed
spoken before midnight.

But you see, this becomes a fundamental
fact in American life. And so you get
theology condoning it. And by this
time, America has begun to really
crystallize. Slavery is 200 years
old. So not only has theology condoned
it, but the American economic power
structure is rooted in it. Rooted in
the presupposition that there will
always be in essence, a nigger. That
there will always, in essence, be a
ready constant supply of cheap labor,
that can be shuttled in and out to do
the menial jobs.

And then swept back out on the other
side of the railroad tracks and on the
outskirts of Northfield when you don't
need them.

So your theology condones it,
blesses it, really.  The economy
needs it. And then along came, you
academic physicians who hauled out,
Carl Linnaeus, dusted off the notion of
the Linnean Web, which said in essence,
that you can determine a man's brain
power and his capacity for intelligence
by measuring the size and shape of his
brain cavity, the cranial chamber.

And so they hemmed me up, you know,
and they're measuring my head, and
they finally come to the conclusion,
poor little black thing. You know,
he's about four ounces of gray matter
short, and he can't quite think
like white boys and girls. And so
the whole trilogy snaps in demeaning.
Theology blesses it, the economy needs
it. And the halls of academia say Lomax
is intellectually inferior and the die
is cast.

But now something very interesting
happens at about this point. And now,
historically we are up to the mid 19th
century. Not only has slavery ended,
for a multiplicity of confusing
reasons, all of which are rooted
in what we're talking about, but
other ethnic groups have come into
America. All of them white. And the
battle then is between them and the
Negro for the most menial jobs. And
over the period of the next 50 years,
we see them one by one, Italian,
Irish, Jew, what have you, absorbed,
all because the great sin in America
is to be black.

As long as you are white, you can
somehow get in, but as long as you
are black, you can never quite really
make it. But another more fundamental
thing has happened. The Negro you
saw coming from Africa on the boat
has disappeared. Less than 5% of the
Negroes you see walking the streets
of America today, are of pure African
descent.

Well, who are these people? It turns
out that the American Negro is a
man-made, not a God-made race.

The name Lomax is Dutch, not
Swahili. And it turns out that the
American Negro is the direct result -
open your ears, girls, you need to
hear this - the direct result of 400
years of illicit and ofttimes forced
relationships between white men and
Negro women.

This is why these fellows are so by sex
obsessed. And they look at me and tell
me about their daughters and their
sisters, and my reaction too late,
baby. You've done it already. We've had
integration in this country at night in
bushes, and behind pine trees, between
white men and Negro women. We've had
it for 400 years and now we're trying
to get it in the schools and in the
churches and on the job, which is where
it belongs.

But you get a man now, in the Negro,
who has been cut out like a cookie
in this country. Biologically, he
is a child of the new world. He's
not an African. Theologically, he
knows nothing but the Judeo-Christian
tradition. His language is English. His
politics is democracy. And while all
the other ethnic groups are running
off into segments of the town, building
their own little ghetto.

This is why it's important for you
to remember what didn't occur on the
boat coming from Africa, the absence of
an African culture. Because while all
of the other groups brought cultures
with them, they brought languages,
traditions, gods, religions, mores,
folkways. The Negro did not bring
them. He never had them. His mores are
rooted as he himself biologically is,
in America itself. Therefore everybody
else is able to break off into positive
ghettos. And you've got an Irish
community and a Jewish community and
a Hungarian community and an Italian
community.

And these people are quite happy to
live together among one another because
they have positive cultural values,
bringing them together. The Negro
has no such thing. And his positive
cultural value is with America as a
whole. And it is the Negro then who
comes into the fore and challenges the
whole idea of separation, indeed, the
whole idea of segregation. And it is
then this Negro who makes the thrust.

He tries education as a way out, and
it becomes a dead end.  And he tries
legalism and he spends 40 years running
between Mississippi and Washington, DC,
getting edicts from the Supreme Court,
taking them back to Mississippi only to
have Mississippi disobey them. And he
goes back and it takes him three years
to get an edict, to tell Mississippi
to obey the first edict. And then
Mississippi proceeds to disobey
both. And then in 1955, 1956 in the
manifestation of Martin Luther King,
the Negro says, well, it's time to
quit praying.

It's time to quit singing. It's time
to quit shouting. It's time to forget
legalism. Here it is white man - either
this country shall behave justly or it
shall not behave at all. And the Negro
begins his major part of the revolution
by walking into the streets and he
sits down. And he says, your buses
won't run, your trains won't move,
your economy shall collapse. The soul
that sinneth shall die.


Non-Violent? Well, on the surface yes,
but actually a death blow. For your
airplanes won't move. Nothing shall
work. Your banks shall not open. Your
traffic light shall change, but the
traffic will not move. There are 20
million of us now. And if we but do
like the Indian, and sit down in the
street, it's all over.

And as a result of that, and I
shall not belabor it because many
of you helped write this section of
the history. We have seen a decade
of phenomenal change, change to the
point now that I am ready to say, that
the visible signs of segregation in
this country will be down within the
next five to ten years. And that this
now - and I hope you Negro students
will hear this part - this very
moment in which we live is almost
the golden age, the Periclean age,
for the gifted trained Negro who can
do something, because everybody all
over America now, is scrambling around
frenetically. Everybody wants to get
him a Negro in residence, you see,
to get off the hook in case the FEPC
comes along.


There's not a day that my phone doesn't
ring in Los Angeles, some big white
businessman. I had a man call me the
other day. And he said, Lomax, yes, I,
Mr. So-and-so president of such and
such a bank. I said, yes, what can
I do? He said, well, I have a job as
vice-president open. And I want to give
it to a Negro. Do you know a Negro who
is qualified to be vice-president of
my bank? I said, well, how many Negro
tellers do you have in your bank?

None. How many Negro auditors do you
have in your bank? None. How many
Negro accountants do you have in your
bank? None. How many Negro janitors do
you have in your bank? He said none.

Now here's a man who's never hired a
Negro in his bank in his life. Now he
wants me to come up with an instant
Negro, you see. Who is qualified to
be vice-president of a bank, and
I'm trying to make him and other
businessmen all across America see
that here you are looking for Negro
vice-presidents, when in reality you
are killing them off in the ghetto
hellhole schools of the north. And as
I said to that bank president, if you
want a Negro vice-president, go out
to UCLA, where you get all these dumb
white boys and get yourself some dumb
Negro boys, and train them just like
you train those stupid white boys. And
20 years from now, guess what?

You'll have yourself, a Negro
vice-president. But just as this is
the golden age for the trained educated
Negro, it is the dark age for the Negro
masses. There's a $1,000 - $1,500 a
year gap between the median income of
the white family, really between the
income of the Negro middle-class family
and the family of the Negro masses and
the gap is getting wider.

The unemployment rate in America today,
almost the lowest ever 4.5. For the
Negro as a whole, it's three times
that, but in Watts, where we had the
riot in Los Angeles, the unemployment
rate is 37.9. Watts is undergoing the
greatest economic depression in the
history of Western civilization. Thus,
my first thesis of the revisitation of
the Negro Revolt, it is becoming less
and less of a race problem and more
and more of a class problem.

The prediction of Oswald Spangler,
made in the thirties when he wrote
The Decline of the West, is now coming
true. He predicted that the American
race problem would one day dissolve
into a class problem. And this is
precisely now what you see. I was there
in Los Angeles, in the middle of the
riot scene and a furniture store was
burning and a Negro came out, balancing
a five seat sofa on his head, going
home with it.

And I stopped him and I said, I'm Louis
Lomax. I want to talk to you. And he
said, yeah, brother Lomax, I see you on
television every Sunday.  Can't talk
now, he says, I got to go home and
dump this sofa and come back and get
the matching chair.

Well, we laugh. We laugh because it
hurts so much. And it hurts so much
because there was a man - and this
is what Watts was really about - whom
society provides no honest way to get
the five seat sofa and the matching
chair. Remember Pavlov's dogs. When a
man is born in our society, we begin
to bombard him the day he gets here,
he sees it in Life and Look and Time
and Newsweek.

He hears it on radio. He sees it on
television. Buy buy buy! You must
have this. You must own that. And you
condition him for 20 years to live in
this acquisitive, middle class economic
society. And if you condition a man for
20 years and tell him that he is not a
man, that she is not a woman, that they
have not really become somebody unless
they have the two cars in the garage
and the split level home and the green
grass growing all around. And if you
condition a man for 20 years to want
this, and then you don't provide him
an honest way to get this, then he's
going to burn baby burn.

And the great challenge facing you
as young people, as scholars and as
economists is to go forth into American
society and make our brand of economy
work. You cannot export that which you
do not grow. And we cannot stand up in
the world and fight communism so long
as we are grinding out a geometrically
increasing number of people who do
not have economic stakes in our own
society.

We are on the verge of class warfare
in this country, not black versus
white, but have versus have-nots. The
preponderance of Negroes will fall
into the have-nots because of what
happened to their mothers and their
grandmothers. And indeed, because of
what happened to them. But the gifted
Negro who went to Carleton can make
it through the chicken wire. And they
will welcome him to suburbia, if he's
willing to buy a split level home and
embrace a tri-level morality. He's
welcome.

And the gulf between the haves and
the have-not gets wider. And the job
of closing it is up to you.  Up to
you in that - and this is the second
point of the revisitation - it means
a rethinking of the American value
proposition of work.  For you see the
Negro revolt is part of the general
shift in our attitudes toward work,
and it meshes into our concern and
should be an alarming concern, I think,
about automation.

Briefly, do you realize young people,
that by the time many of you hit the
American market, 30 to 35% of us will
be producing all of the goods consumed
by the remainder of us.

Well, a machine can make a car,
but it can't buy it. Now, if I'm
going to buy the car, then they've
got to give me something to do when
there are no jobs, which means - you
Goldwaterites better watch your hearts
now - it means we're going to have to
come out with a guaranteed annual wage
in this country. This is the kind of
economy you are headed into fellows,
and people are going to get paid for
all kinds of interesting things. We're
going to redefine work and all kinds
of new and interesting ways.

But some of you already getting paid to
go to school.  Who knows you probably
soon be getting paid to go to the
library, which is work, getting paid
to go to concerts.  Negro women in the
ghetto who have illegitimate children
are already getting paid for having
babies, you know. And who knows, we
may pay housewives for staying home
and rearing families.

And it's going to be very interesting
to watch this psychological change
of gears.  For you fellows who were
rooted in the Anglo-Saxon Protestant
tradition of hard work and thrift
with the notion that the laborer shall
go forth into the vineyard and pluck
grapes and be paid a few pennies and
with the pennies buy wine, which would
create a demand for more grapes -
and therefore the capitalistic mill
turns. And the great holy virtues,
of course, are hard work and thrift.

Well, you don't go into the vineyard
anymore. A machine goes into the
vineyard. And you're going to have
to learn how to relax and get paid
for doing nothing. You would probably
collectively go insane. And this is
one reason why you need to integrate
with me because for 400 years, I have
been conditioned to accept just this
possibility.

But the serious deep part is that
young people, such as you must prepare
yourselves for the crude fact that
the economic world of your mothers
and fathers is no more. The concept
of work - the sweat of one's brow -
has moved on. Indeed, I was involved in
a demonstration outside the Sara-Lou
cookie plant in Chicago, and it was
snowing, and we walked around with our
signs singing We Shall Overcome. Well,
it turns out, that between the time
we conducted the study to find out
that they had a discriminatory hiring
policy - between that time and the
time we got the picket line going,
the plant had automated.

They had put in a behemoth -  one great
big, huge machine. It took one idiot
man to push a button and a red light
would come on and a conveyor belt would
start to move. The machine would mix
the batter, pour it on the belt, level
it out, run it around in the oven,
cook it brown, cut out the cookie,
bring it out of the oven, wrap it in
cellophane, and pack it in a box. And
the machine turns out 300,000 dozen
cookies a night. And we walking around
singing We Shall Overcome.

And the plant manager came out and
he said, oh, what do you people
want? We said, we want you to hire
some Negroes. He said, hell, I'm not
even hiring people. Well, I think
when you put the Negro Revolt flesh
against the possibility of automation,
you suddenly come to realize the major
changes that I'm talking about in the
Negro Revolt, I think is only one of
the symptoms. It's indeed, as John
said, a new heaven and a new earth. A
new earth in which a class problem must
be resolved by a missionary application
of a new work ethic and a new concept
of money.

It is a new world finally. In that it
is a new morality.  A new morality
coming from the church secular, the
church of the streets, the church of
the swamps, the church of the concrete
dams, the church of the bayous of
Mississippi.

It is a secular ethic, a secular
morality that had to emerge because the
institutionalized church, which came
to save man, has become the principal
thing from which man must now be
saved. What came in the name of God has
now become the cradle of bigotry. It
turns out Jews who can't live with
anybody but Jews, and Catholics who
can't live with anybody but Catholics,
and white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who
can't live even with themselves.

And the great morality now, has moved
as it always does in history, out from
among those who would institutionalize
it. And it has fallen into the hands
of those who would make pragmatism of
it. Who would, if I may coin a word,
practicalize it.

The new gospel then, is the gospel
according to Barbara Streisand -
people, who need people, are the
luckiest people, in the world.
Teachers, who dig people, they and they
alone, will save the ghetto.

Men who love mankind, they alone
matter. Who cares, whether Jesus
walked one step or two steps on the
water. The point is let's get rid of a
society that throws bricks at children
going to school, that hangs men from
trees. Who cares, really, whether Mary
went to heaven directly or indirectly,
with one shoe on or one shoe off.

The point is, let's feed man. Let's
clothe man. Let's house man. Who
really cares whether there is a second
coming. The point is let there be no
more war.

The new ethic is man centered rather
than theory centered.  The new theology
is centered on my brother, and wherever
God is, he will show up if I find my
brother. There is that great moment
in the New Testament where Jesus says
to a few of his disciples, come on,
I'm going to let you guys live a
little. And he takes them up on a
mountain and he says, see that. And
they look out, looked out and they saw
the plains in Minnesota, but they were
carried away by this mountain.

And they said, Lord, these mountains
are really something. Let's build three
tabernacles up here. And Jesus said,
are you crazy? You must be insane. I
didn't bring you on top of this
mountain for you to build tabernacles
on a mountain. I brought you up here
to show you where your job is. Get down
off this mountain.

There's a nigger down there in that
valley, the victim of 400 years of
slavery and segregation. Get off
this mountain. Teach him, learn
to love by loving him. There's
a Jew down there. Get off this
mountain. Understand him.  Live with
him.

Find yourselves by finding your
brother. There's a communist down in
that valley. Get off this mountain and
write a pact of peace. There's a poor
white man down in that valley. Get
off this mountain. People who need
people become the greatest people in
the world.

This then is the ethic of tomorrow. And
as Rabbi Hillel put it -
 If I am for myself alone, what good am I?  
 But if I am not for myself, who will be for me?  
 If not now, when?