By acts of commission and omission none of us in this great country has done enough to remove injustice. I therefore humbly suggest that all of us accept our share of responsibility for these past days of anguish.

The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.

Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

It is one thing for a white person of good will in the North to rise up with righteous indignation when a bus is burned in Anniston, Alabama, with freedom riders, or when a nasty mob assembles around a University of Mississippi, and even goes to the point of killing and injuring people to keep one Negro out of the university, or when a Negro is lynched or churches burned in the South; but that same person of good will must rise up with the same righteous indignation when a Negro in his state or in his city cannot live in a particular neighborhood because of the color of his skin, or cannot join a particular academic society or fraternal order or sorority because of the color of his or her skin, or cannot get a particular job in a particular firm because her happens to be a Negro.

The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible.

A great nation is a compassionate nation.