Martin Luther King, Jr. Offered America a Choice

Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us.”

So said Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as he spoke against the Vietnam War on April 4, 1967, at New York City’s Riverside Church. He showed that the Vietnam War was a blow to civil rights in the United States, that the war attacked racial justice just as surely as did racial oppression at home:

In his usual masterly fashion, King employed language to drive home a series of ideas, to impel the audience to make moral choices—not just one idea, but several ways to choose between good and evil. He connected the war with the United States' civil rights movement:

“We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

Just as African Americans were victimized in our own land, King reminded that “We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless.” Narrating the suffering of Vietnamese peasants during the war, King stated that, “These, too, are our brothers.”

That theme led King, step by step, to a trio of moral choices. At the end, King used parallel language to his speech with an emotional appeal. King’s trope offered the audience a choice between, on the one hand, the evils of the present day, or, on the other hand, a chance to choose a world of kindness and love. King’s trope showed the audience that, “If we make the right choice,” we could have one–or the other. 

Riverside Church

Rhetorical tropes like the ones in which King excelled are not just decorations, no, they symbolize our thoughts and structure our feelings. They are among a persuasive speaker’s best friends. As philosopher Ernst Cassirer explained, language creates and develops our concepts, our thinking, and our vision. We can neither think nor decide, he said, without processing language.

So, after reviewing the war’s injustices, King’s language linked choice, conflict, and justice. He quoted the poet James Russell Lowell: “Though the cause of evil prosper, yet ‘tis truth alone is strong.” The truth that King extolled was the need for the entire nation to make positive choices, to turn back from violence.

King reviewed the horrors of bombing, crop destruction, and civilian casualties. Indeed, recounting the war’s destruction, King noted that the violence left nothing behind but sadness and regret:

“Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness.”

And who bore responsibility? It was a choice, a decision to pursue violent solutions to Vietnam's problems. To drive that point home, King, always the master of speech conclusions, finally linked choices, universal moral principles, and world conflict into a chance to reform the world in a spirit of love:

“And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace. If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when ‘justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’”

The quotation was from the Bible, Amos 5:24. Each “If” started with the violent, chaotic choice—the choice of war and conflict—but then offered an alternate choice of justice and compassion. King contoured his string of parallel phrases into a vision of moral reform. His “If” statements offer a hypothetical list of what humanity could accomplish if we adopt universal (King said “cosmic”) choices.

Each of the three “If” statements offered a different answer. The first “If” statement offered us a chance to make “the right choice,” and, if we made the right choice, we could turn the “cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.” An elegy, of course, is a funeral oration, and King ironically offered his audience a chance to choose life rather than reified cosmic death.

King’s next “If” statement offered an additional benefit of choice: that the world’s conflicts – “jangling discords” – into a “beautiful symphony” of universal love. His final “If” statement offered us – by which he meant the American people – a chance to make real the prophet Isaiah’s mythical world of justice. In that world, “justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

When we say “if,” we remind people that things can be different. The point that King’s powerful language made unmistakable is that these are choices. We can choose between a cosmic funeral or a song of peace. We can choose to turn world conflict into unity. If we make the right choices, we can “speed up the day, all over America and all over the world,” when the prophet’s judgment of future harmony becomes, not merely a supernatural gift from God, but a decision that we make as a human race.

Speech conclusions carry great power, for they give the listeners the last thoughts to carry away as a speaker leaves the stage. We might pay little attention to the middle of even the greatest speech, but everyone notices an outstanding introduction or conclusion. King’s conclusion challenged the nation to make the right choices.

The Law Can't Change the Heart, but It Can Restrain the Heartless:" Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Speech about Church and the Struggle for Justice
https://harpine.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-law-cant-change-heart-but-it-can.html

This speech offered a choice with three spiritual and tangible outcomes. The threefold repetition, “If...choice, If...choice, If...choice,” underscores that evil is a choice, just as we have the chance to choose what is right. President John Kennedy had said, “here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own;” likewise, King said that whether we have peace or violence, cruelty or mercy, justice or injustice, was a choice. A decision. We can choose good things just as we can choose their opposites.

As a preacher, King gave America a chance to choose to live by God’s law of peace and righteousness. King’s lesson was that, not only are the world’s conflicts a choice, but the possibility of ending them was also a choice, a choice that we made by our own actions. To avoid a choice, however? That’s not an option. A university philosophy major himself, King surely knew Jean-Paul Sartre’s dictum that to refuse making a choice is still a choice. King offered a choice between what was evil, or what is good. Not war and violence foisted upon us, but war and violence that we choose. Just as Cassirer was an idealist of language use, so King was a moral idealist who used language to reshape our failing moral attitudes.

by William D. Harpine

About King's Last and Perhaps Greatest Speech:

Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Mountaintop in Memphis, Tennessee: A Speech for the Ages

Another speech using parallel language:

Rhetorical Flourishes in JB Pritzker's Speech against Militarizing Chicago

For a list of more posts about Martin Luther King, Jr.'s speaking career, search in the text box at the right.

    

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Research Note: I plowed through Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in graduate school. For people ambitious enough to give it a look, the work is still in print, and available in large research libraries. 

And, yes, my professors also had me read Sartre’s massive  Being and Nothingness. (I must have had far more endurance when I was young!) Whether Sartre was really an atheist or a messianic Jew is a matter that his biographers can debate. His philosophy’s prevailing morality is nonetheless unmistakable.

Rhetorical theorists for centuries have catalogued seemingly endless collections of rhetorical figures and tropes. Here is one nicely condensed list, compiled by Stanford University Lecturer Jonah Willihnganz.

Many thanks to AmericanRhetoric.com for publishing texts of this and many other great speeches.

Copyright © 2025 by William D. Harpine

Image of Martin Luther King, Jr: US News and World Report, released to public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Image of Riverside Church, photo by Bhuck, Creative Commons License, via Wikimedia Commons