At home, I spent the rest of the night and much of the next day writing:
APRIL 4, 1968
The volcano exploded
In a searing fury
That shattered our tranquility
With rebellion,
blasted our propriety.
with lawlessness,
and broke our complacency
with bitterness and resentment.
The caustic smoke of hate
and the charred debris of violence
smothered and sickened us all.
Men,
at the risk of their lives,
have saved others,
restrained the looting,
the arson,
and the debacle of destruction.
They have contained the holocaust
and stemmed the anarchy,
until the boiling madness abated
and a simmering quiet
could be restored.
Some fingers seeking cause
will point at the small but terrible bullet
that pierced the crust
and let the violence out.
These will seek the firer of the shot;
and, having found him,
they'll wreak their vengeance
in the name of Justice,
and call for a return of peace and order.
But the seething anger that erupted
will not be extinguished
by a single act of justice,
for the molten lava of insurrection
was heated to explosive incandescence
by a furnace fed with a multitude
of inflammatory oppressions.
These were not so much
the sinister vices of hate and sadism.
They were in greatest number
the ordinary transgressions
of self seeking and perfidy,
of disparagement and disfranchisement,
of encroachment and exploitation,
of cavil and insinuation,
of derision and ostracism,
of indifference and omission,
of inertia,
and of persistent vacillation and delay.
These,
in the enormity of their numbers,
in the relentless pinpoint application
of their flames,
in the ubiquitous profusion
of their incendiary pressures,
created the caldron
of contempt and indignation
that burst,
in a paroxysm of destruction,
the thin crust of law and customs and decency.
The cinders from the violence
fall on us all;
and mark us with our irresponsibility,
and smear us with the fullness of our guilt.
We, in Government,
with all the rest,
must share this condemnation,
or we have misused our trust
and our tremendous instruments of power,
For shackled them with inaction and equivocation,
when power and action
could have extinguished the flames.
If, from the ashes of this conflagration,
we are to build anew,
(and this we must)
let us replace the questioning when with now,
the doubting where with here,
the hesitant how with decision.
Let us meet the immensity of the need
with our prowess in political accomplishment,
with the machinery of the Executive,
with the power of courage,
and the strength of morality.
I gave a copy of the poem to Bill Seabron, the Civil Rights Coordinator in the Secretary's Office. A few days later he surprised me with a copy of the African American News in which the poem had been published.
On January 15, 1970, I was asked to read the poem at a USDA memorial service for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I prefaced my reading with the following statement:
We are here today to commemorate a life. In my personal opinion, Martin Luther King., Jr. will be remembered by generations to come as one of the truly great men of this century and possibly of all time. The social ideals which he pushed forward are among the highest and most advanced ever conceived by mankind. I am honored to have been invited to participate in a ceremony in his honor.
The poem, which I shall read, was written to fill a personal need of my own a need to salvage some constructive basis for action from the terrible tragedy and upheaval at the time of Martin Luther King Jr.'s death.
It is a poem of dedication. Even though we have made some progress in the area of Civil Rights since 1968, the enormity of the need allows no room for complacency. It points up the appropriateness of rededication to the great social effort for which Dr. King gave his life.
During my tenure as Director, I made far more progress in my personal commitment to Civil Rights than I did in correcting the situation in the extension services. The Department of Justice initiated suits against some southern state extension services. Because of the decision- making role of local leaders, and the education functions of the county agents, this often put the state extension directors in an impossible position to comply. Only during the last few months of my tenure as Director, did I realize that Civil Rights implementation in the extension services needed to be funded as a program. This would create leverage for extension agents to use when trying to convince local leaders to provide services to African Americans. Such a program would be an unusual way to obtain compliance with a law, but it would be one adapted to the circumstances of the extension services. Some would say that my idea would be like bribing a policeman to do his duty. Extension agents however are not policemen; they are educators. Providing funds to the counties for reaching out to minorities would be more effective, in my opinion, than penalizing the agents for not enforcing a law. My term as Director ended in 1973 before I was able to promote this idea.