“I Predict: Twenty-five Farseeing People Tell What They Hope, Fear and Imagine for 1987”
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: January 16, 1962
Genre: Published Article
Topic: Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views
Nonviolence
Details
Responding to a request from Daniel D. Mich, King offers a statement for the January 1962 issue of Look.1
“I hope that world peace will have become secure, not because a balance of terror will have paralyzed mankind, but because most of the world’s people will have realized that nonviolence in the nuclear age was life’s last chance.2 I hope that militarism and mass ignorance will have become ugly relics of a vain quasi-civilization.3 I would expect the world to blush with shame to recall that, three decades earlier, a human being was graded by the color of his skin and degraded if that color was not white. I would expect the Christian era to begin.”
1. Mich to King, 6 July 1961. Other contributors included President John F. Kennedy, Eleanor Roosevelt, former U.S. ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce, and socialist leader Norman Thomas.
2. King’s draft was slightly different from the published version: “I would hope that world peace would have become secure not because a balance of frightful terror paralyzed mankind, but because a majority of the world’s people, regardless of their political systems, realized that non-violence in the nuclear age was life’s last chance, and no ruler anywhere was strong enough to defy this monumental truth” (King, Draft, I Predict, 4 August 1961).
3. King’s draft: “I would expect a world in which poverty, race prejudice, militarism, and mass ignorance would have become ugly relics of vain quasi-civilization. I would expect the Christian era to begin” (Draft, I Predict, 4 August 1961).
Source: Look, 16 January 1962, p. 19.