The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers… - Martin Luther King Jr.

Today it is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence; it is either nonviolence or nonexistence. It may not be that Mahatma Gandhi is God's appeal to this age, an age drifting to its doom. And that warning, and that appeal is always in the form of a warning: "He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword." Jesus said it years ago. Whenever men follow that and see that way, new horizons begin to emerge and a new world unfolds. Who today will follow Christ in his way and follow it so much that we'll be able to do greater things even than he did because we will be able to bring about the peace of the world and mobilize hundreds and thousands of men to follow the way of Christ?

I'm delighted to see each of you here tonight in spite of a storm warning. You reveal that you are determined to go on anyhow. Something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world.

Without love, there is no reason to know anyone, for love will in the end connect us to our neighbors, our children and our hearts.