Below is the full text (Edited version) of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech on “Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool.” This event occurred on August 27, 1967.
TRANSCRIPT:
“Why Jesus Called A Man A Fool.”
I want to share with you a dramatic little story from the gospel as recorded by Saint Luke. It is a story of a man who by all standards of measurement would be considered a highly successful man.
And yet, Jesus called him a fool.
If you will read that parable, you will discover that the central character in the drama is a certain rich man. This man was so rich that his farm yielded tremendous crops.
In fact, the crops were so great that he didn’t know what to do. And it occurred to him that he had only one alternative, and that was to build some new and bigger barns so he could store all of his crops.
“Take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” That brother thought that was the end of life.
But the parable doesn’t end with that man making his statement. It ends by saying that God said to him, “Thou fool. Not next year, not next week, not tomorrow, but this night, thy soul is required of thee.”
And so it was at the height of his prosperity he died.
Look at that parable. Think about it. Think of this man: If he lived in Chicago today, he would be considered “a big shot.” And he would abound with all of the social prestige and all of the community influence that could be afforded.
Most people would look up to him because he would have that something called money. And yet, a Galilean peasant had the audacity to call that man a fool.
I’d like for you to look at this parable with me and try to decipher the real reason that Jesus called this man a fool.
Number one, Jesus called this man a fool because he allowed the means by which he lived to outdistance the ends for which he lived.
You see, each of us lives in two realms, the within and the without.
The without of our lives is that complex of devices, of mechanisms and instrumentalities by means of which we live. The house we live in — that’s a part of the means by which we live. The car we drive, the clothes we wear, the money that we are able to accumulate — in short, the physical stuff that’s necessary for us to exist.
Now the problem is that we must always keep a line of demarcation between the two.
This man was a fool because he didn’t do that. He didn’t make contributions to civil rights. He looked at suffering humanity and wasn’t concerned about it. He probably gave his wife mink coats, a convertible automobile, but he didn’t give her what she needed most: love and affection.
He probably provided bread for his children, but he didn’t give them any attention; he didn’t really love them. And so this man justly deserved his title. He was an eternal fool.
He allowed the means by which he lived to outdistance the ends for which he lived.
Now number two, this man was a fool because he failed to realize his dependence on others.
Now if you read that parable in the book of Luke, you will discover that this man utters about 60 words. And do you know in 60 words he said “I” and “my” more than 15 times?
This man was a fool because he said “I” and “my” so much until he lost the capacity to say “we” and “our.” This man talked like he could build the barns by himself, like he could till the soil by himself.
He failed to realize that wealth is always a result of the commonwealth. And oh my friends, I don’t want you to forget it.
No matter where you are today, somebody helped you to get there. In a larger sense we’ve got to see this in our world today.
Our white brothers must see this; they haven’t seen it up to now. The great problem facing our nation today in the area of race is that it is the black man, who to a large extent, produced the wealth of this nation. And the nation doesn’t have sense enough to share its wealth and its power with the very people who made it so.
And I know what I’m talking about this morning. The black man made America wealthy. That’s why I tell you right now, I’m not going anywhere. They can talk, these groups, some people talking about a separate state, or go back to Africa. I love Africa, it’s our ancestral home.
But I don’t know about you. My grandfather and my great-grandfather did too much to build this nation for me to be talking about getting away from it.
Before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth in 1620, we were here. Before Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here.
Before the beautiful words of the “Star Spangled Banner” were written, we were here. For more than two centuries, our forebearers labored here without wages. They made cotton king.
With their hands and with their backs and with their labor, they built the sturdy docks, the stout factories, the impressive mansions of the South.
Now this nation is telling us that we can’t build. Negroes are excluded almost absolutely from the building trades. It’s lily white. Why?
Because these jobs pay six, seven, eight, nine and ten dollars an hour, and they don’t want Negroes to have it. And I feel that if something doesn’t happen soon, and something massive, the same indictment will come to America — “Thou fool!”
That man said he didn’t know what to do with his goods, he had so many. Oh, I wish I could have advised him. A lot of places to go, and there were a lot of things that could be done.
There were hungry stomachs that needed to be filled; there were empty pockets that needed access to money. America today, my friends, is also rich in goods.
We have our barns, and every day our rich nation is building new and larger and greater barns. You know, we spend millions of dollars a day to store surplus food.
But I want to say to America, “I know where you can store that food free of charge: in the wrinkled stomachs of the millions of God’s children in Asia and Africa and South America and in our own nation who go to bed hungry tonight.”
There are a lot of fools around. Because they fail to realize their dependence on others.
Finally, this man was a fool because he failed to realize his dependence on God. Do you know that man talked like he regulated the seasons? That man talked like he gave the rain to grapple with the fertility of the soil.
That man talked like he provided the dew. He was a fool because he ended up acting like he was the Creator, instead of a creature.
And this man-centered foolishness is still alive today. You know, a lot of people are forgetting God, people just get involved in other things.
But I tell you this morning, my friends, there’s no way to get rid of him. One day, you’re going to need him.
The problems of life will begin to overwhelm you; disappointments will begin to beat upon the door of your life like a tidal wave. And if you don’t have a deep and patient faith, you aren’t going to be able to make it. I know this from my own experience.
I grew up in the church. I’m the son of a preacher, I’m the great-grandson of a preacher, and the great-great-grandson of a preacher. My father is a preacher, my grandfather was a preacher, my great-grandfather was a preacher, my only brother is a preacher, my Daddy’s brother is a preacher. So I didn’t have much choice, I guess.
But I had grown up in the church, and the church meant something very real to me, but it was a kind of inherited religion and I had never felt Lord, an experience with God in the way that you must have it if you’re going to walk the lonely paths of this life.
But one day after finishing school, I was called to a little church down in Montgomery, Alabama. A year later, a lady by the name of Rosa Parks decided that she wasn’t going to take it any longer.
She stayed in a bus seat, and you may not remember it because it’s way back now several years, but it was the beginning of a movement where 50,000 black men and women refused absolutely to ride the city buses.
And we walked together for 381 days. That’s what we got to learn in the North: Negroes have to learn to stick together. We stuck together. We sent out the call and no Negro rode the buses.
It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen in my life. And the people of Montgomery asked me to serve as the spokesman, and as the president of the new organization — the Montgomery Improvement Association that came into being to lead the boycott — I couldn’t say no.
And then we started our struggle together. Things were going well for the first few days, but then about ten or fifteen days later, after the white people in Montgomery knew that we meant business, they started doing some nasty things.
They started making nasty telephone calls, and it came to the point that some days more than 40 telephone calls would come in, threatening my life, the life of my family, the life of my children.
I took it for a while in a strong manner. But I never will forget one night very late. It was around midnight. And you can have some strange experiences at midnight. I had been out meeting with the steering committee all that night.
And I came home, and my wife was in the bed and I immediately crawled into bed to get some rest to get up early the next morning to try to keep things going. And immediately the telephone started ringing and I picked it up.
On the other end was an ugly voice. That voice said to me, in substance, “Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.”
I’d heard these things before, but for some reason that night it got to me. I turned over and I tried to go to sleep, but I couldn’t sleep. I was frustrated, bewildered.
And then I got up and went back to the kitchen and I started warming some coffee, thinking that coffee would give me a little relief. And then I started thinking about many things.
I pulled back on the theology and philosophy that I had just studied in the universities, trying to give philosophical and theological reasons for the existence and the reality of sin and evil, but the answer didn’t quite come there.
I sat there and thought about a beautiful little daughter who had just been born about a month earlier. We have four children now, but we only had one then. She was the darling of my life. I’d come in night after night and see that little gentle smile.
And I sat at that table thinking about that little girl and thinking about the fact that she could be taken away from me any minute. And I started thinking about a dedicated, devoted, and loyal wife who was over there asleep. And she could be taken from me, or I could be taken from her.
And I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any longer; I was weak. Something said to me, you can’t call on Daddy now, he’s up in Atlanta 170 miles away. You can’t even call on Mama now. You’ve got to call on that something in that person that your Daddy used to tell you about.
That power that can make a way out of no way. And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed down over that cup of coffee — I never will forget it.
And oh yes, I prayed a prayer and I prayed out loud that night. I said, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right; I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now; I’m faltering; I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.”
And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.”
And I’ll tell you, I’ve seen the lightning flash. I’ve heard the thunder roll. I felt sin- breakers dashing, trying to conquer my soul. But I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No, never alone. No, never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.
And I’m going on in believing in him. You’d better know him, and know his name, and know how to call his name. Don’t be a fool. Recognize your dependence on God.
Centuries ago Jeremiah raised a question, “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” He raised it because he saw the good people suffering so often and the evil people prospering.
Centuries later our slave foreparents came along. And they too saw the injustices of life, and had nothing to look forward to morning after morning but the rawhide whip of the overseer, long rows of cotton in the sizzling heat.
But they did an amazing thing. They looked back across the centuries and they took Jeremiah’s question mark and straightened it into an exclamation point. And they could sing, “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”
And there is another stanza that I like so well: “Sometimes I feel discouraged.” And I don’t mind telling you this morning that sometimes I feel discouraged. I felt discouraged in Chicago.
As I move through Mississippi and Georgia and Alabama, I feel discouraged. Living every day under the threat of death, I feel discouraged sometimes. Living every day under extensive criticisms, even from Negroes, I feel discouraged sometimes.
Yes, sometimes I feel discouraged and feel my work’s in vain. But then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again. “There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”
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