King accepted the prize in the name of “those devotees
Of nonviolence” climbing the “ramparts of racial injustice.”
He’d come to believe in using Gandhi’s non-violent
Resistance. So they walked and they marched – and they sat.
They were shot, bombed, arrested, beaten, jailed and spat at,
And the eyes of the nation began to have to see
The ugly discrimination still practiced so boldly in the South.
The FBI followed him, tried to blackmail him into
Quitting the movement. Instead, it expanded and went
From a black movement to a broader insistence
That “human worth” over poverty and war must triumph.
“Now is the time,” he said and was right to demand
A swift ending to the war in Vietnam,
The war from which 58,000 American men
Never came home again.
June Edvenson 