Day of  Affirmation Address

Robert F. Kennedy

University of Cape Town

Cape Town, South Africa

June 6, 1966

                                                                                                                                  (Listen to it here.)

I came  here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by  the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the  British, and at last independent; a land in which the native  inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a  problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile  frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the  energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported  slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that  former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.

     But I am  glad to come here to South Africa. I am already enjoying my visit. I  am making an effort to meet and exchange views with people from all  walks of life, and all segments of South African opinion, including  those who represent the views of the government. Today I am glad to  meet with the National Union of South African Students. For a decade,  NUSAS has stood and worked for the principles of the Universal  Declaration of Human Rights--principles which embody the collective  hopes of men of good will all around the world.

     Your work,  at home and in international student affairs, has brought great credit  to yourselves and to your country. I know the National Student  Association in the United States feels a particularly close  relationship to NUSAS. And I wish to thank especially Mr. Ian  Robertson, who first extended this invitation on behalf of NUSAS, for  his kindness to me. It's too bad he can't be with us today.

     This is a  Day of Affirmation, a celebration of liberty. We stand here in the  name of freedom.

     At the  heart of that Western freedom and democracy is the belief that the  individual man, the child of God, is the touchstone of value, and all  society, groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the  enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme  goal and the abiding practice of any Western society.

     Hand in  hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard, to share in  the decisions of government which shape men's lives. Everything that  makes man's life worthwhile--family, work, education, a place to rear one's children and a place to rest one's head--all this depends on  decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which  does not heed the demands of its people. Therefore, the essential  humanity of men can be protected and preserved only where government  must answer--not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, or a particular race, but to all its people.

     And even  government by the consent of the governed, as in our own Constitution,  must be limited in its power to act against its people; so that there  may be no interference with the right to worship, or with the security  of the home; no arbitrary imposition of pains or penalties by  officials high or low; no restrictions on the freedom of men to seek  education or work or opportunity of any kind, so that each man may  become all he is capable of becoming.

     These are  the sacred rights of Western society. These were the essential  differences between us and Nazi Germany, as they were between Athens  and Persia.

     They are  the essence of our differences with communism today. I am unalterably  opposed to communism because it exalts the state over the individual  and the family, and because of the lack of freedom of speech, of protest, of religion, and of the press, which is the characteristic of  totalitarian states. The way of opposition to communism is not to  imitate its dictatorship, but to enlarge individual freedom, in our  own countries and all over the globe. There are those in every land  who would label as Communist every threat to their privilege. But as I have seen on my travels in all sections of the world, reform is not  communism. And the denial of freedom, in whatever name, only  strengthens the very communism it claims to oppose.

     Many  nations have set forth their own definitions and declarations of these  principles. And there have often been wide and tragic gaps between  promise and performance, ideal and reality. Yet the great ideals have constantly recalled us to our duties. And--with painful slowness--we  have extended and enlarged the meaning and the practice of freedom for  all our people.

     For two  centuries, my own country has struggled to overcome the self-imposed  handicap of prejudice and discrimination based on nationality, social  class, or race--discrimination profoundly repugnant to the theory and command of our Constitution. Even as my father grew up in Boston,  signs told him that No Irish Need Apply. Two generations later  President Kennedy became the first Catholic to head the nation; but  how many men of ability had, before 1961, been denied the opportunity  to contribute to the nation's progress because they were Catholic, or of Irish extraction? How many sons of Italian or Jewish or Polish  parents slumbered in slums--untaught, unlearned, their potential lost  forever to the nation and human race? Even today, what price will we  pay before we have assured full opportunity to millions of Negro  Americans?

     In the last  five years we have done more to assure equality to our Negro citizens,  and to help the deprived both white and black, than in the hundred  years before. But much more remains to be done.

     For there  are millions of Negroes untrained for the simplest of jobs, and  thousands every day denied their full equal rights under the law; and  the violence of the disinherited, the insulted and injured, looms over  the streets of Harlem and Watts and South Side Chicago.

     But a Negro  American trains as an astronaut, one of mankind's first explorers into  outer space; another is the chief barrister of the United States  government, and dozens sit on the benches of court; and another, Dr.  Martin Luther King, is the second man of African descent to win the  Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent efforts for social justice  between races.

     We have  passed laws prohibiting discrimination in education, in employment, in  housing, but these laws alone cannot overcome the heritage of  centuries--of broken families and stunted children, and poverty and  degradation and pain.

     So the road  toward equality of freedom is not easy, and great cost and danger  march alongside us. We are committed to peaceful and nonviolent  change, and that is important for all to understand--though all change  is unsettling. Still, even in the turbulence of protest and struggle  is greater hope for the future, as men learn to claim and achieve for  themselves the rights formerly petitioned from others.

     And most  important of all, all the panoply of government power has been  committed to the goal of equality before the law, as we are now  committing ourselves to the achievement of equal opportunity in fact.

     We must  recognize the full human equality of all of our people before God,  before the law, and in the councils of government. We must do this,  not because it is economically advantageous, although it is; not  because of the laws of God command it, although they do; not because  people in other lands wish it so. We must do it for the single and  fundamental reason that it is the right thing to do.

     We  recognize that there are problems and obstacles before the fulfillment  of these ideals in the United States, as we recognize that other  nations, in Latin America and Asia and Africa, have their own  political, economic, and social problems, their unique barriers to the  elimination of injustices.

     In some,  there is concern that change will submerge the rights of a minority,  particularly where the minority is of a different race from the  majority. We in the United States believe in the protection of  minorities; we recognize the contributions they can make and the  leadership they can provide; and we do not believe that any  people--whether minority, majority, or individual human beings--are  "expendable" in the cause of theory or policy. We recognize  also that justice between men and nations is imperfect, and that  humanity sometimes progresses slowly.

     All do not  develop in the same manner, or at the same pace. Nations, like men,  often march to the beat of different drummers, and the precise  solutions of the United States can neither be dictated nor  transplanted to others. What is important is that all nations must  march toward increasing freedom; toward justice for all; toward a society strong and flexible enough to meet the demands of all its own  people, and a world of immense and dizzying change.

     In a few  hours, the plane that brought me to this country crossed over oceans  and countries which have been a crucible of human history. In minutes  we traced the migration of men over thousands of years; seconds, the briefest glimpse, and we passed battlefields on which millions of men  once struggled and died. We could see no national boundaries, no vast  gulfs or high walls dividing people from people; only nature and the  works of man--homes and factories and farms--everywhere reflecting  Man's common effort to enrich his life. Everywhere new technology and  communications bring men and nations closer together, the concerns of  one inevitably becoming the concerns of all. And our new closeness is  stripping away the false masks, the illusion of difference which is at the root of injustice and hate and war. Only earthbound man still  clings to the dark and poisoning superstition that his world is  bounded by the nearest hill, his universe ended at river shore, his  common humanity enclosed in the tight circle of those who share his  town and views and the color of his skin.

     It is your  job, the task of the young people of this world, to strip the last  remnants of that ancient, cruel belief from the civilization of man.

     Each nation  has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of  history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the  world I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of  their goals, their desires and their concerns and their hope for the  future. There is discrimination in New York, the racial inequality of  apartheid in South Africa, and serfdom in the mountains of Peru.  People starve in the streets of India, a former Prime Minister is  summarily executed in the Congo, intellectuals go to jail in Russia,  and thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on  armaments everywhere in the world. These are differing evils; but they  are the common works of man. They reflect the imperfections of human  justice, the inadequacy of human compassion, the defectiveness of our  sensibility toward the sufferings of our fellows; they mark the limit  of our ability to use knowledge for the well-being of our fellow human  beings throughout the world. And therefore they call upon common  qualities of conscience and indignation, a shared determination to  wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at  home and around the world.

     It is these  qualities which make of youth today the only true international  community. More than this I think that we could agree on what kind of  a world we would all want to build. it would be a world of independent  nations, moving toward international community, each of which  protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world  which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to  insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating  economic progress--not material welfare as an end in itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his  talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that  we would be proud to have built.

     Just to the  north of here are lands of challenge and opportunity rich in natural  resources, land and minerals and people. Yet they are also lands  confronted by the greatest odds--overwhelming ignorance, internal  tensions and strife, and great obstacles of climate and geography.  Many of these nations, as colonies, were oppressed and exploited. Yet  they have not estranged themselves from the broad traditions of the  West; they are hoping and gambling their progress and stability on the  chance that we will meet our responsibilities to help them overcome their poverty.

     In the  world we would like to build, South Africa could play an outstanding  role in that effort. This is without question a preeminent repository  of the wealth and knowledge and skill of the continent. Here are the  greater part of Africa's research scientists and steel production,  most of its reservoirs of coal and electric power. Many South Africans  have made major contributions to African technical development and  world science; the names of some are known wherever men seek to  eliminate the ravages of tropical diseases and pestilence. In your  faculties and councils, here in this very audience, are hundreds and  thousands of men who could transform the lives of millions for all  time to come.

     But the  help and the leadership of South Africa or the United States cannot be  accepted if we--within our own countries or in our relations with  others--deny individual integrity, human dignity, and the common  humanity of man. If we would lead outside our borders, if we would  help those who need our assistance, if we would meet our responsibilities to mankind, we must first, all of us, demolish the  borders which history has erected between men within our own  nations--barriers of race and religion, social class and ignorance.

     Our answer  is the world's hope; it is to rely on youth. The cruelties and  obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete  dogmas and outworn slogans. It cannot be moved by those who cling to a  present which is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to  the excitement and danger which comes with even the most peaceful  progress.

     This world  demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of  mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a  predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure  over the love of ease. It is a revolutionary world we live in, and  thus, as I have said in Latin America and Asia, in Europe and in the  United States, it is young people who must take the lead. Thus you,  and your young compatriots everywhere, have had thrust upon you a  greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever  lived.

     "There  is," said an Italian philosopher, "nothing more difficult to  take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its  success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of  things." Yet this is the measure of the task of your generation,  and the road is strewn with many dangers.

     First, is  the danger of futility: the belief there is nothing one man or one  woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills--against  misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's  greatest movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work  of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant Reformation, a  young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the  earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a  young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the  thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are  created equal.

     "Give  me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the  world." These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will  have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to  change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts  will be written the history of this generation. Thousands of Peace  Corps volunteers are making a difference in isolated villages and city  slums in dozens of countries. Thousands of unknown men and women in  Europe resisted the occupation of the Nazis and many died, but all  added to the ultimate strength and freedom of their countries. It is  from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history  is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve  the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a  tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different  centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can  sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

     "If  Athens shall appear great to you," said Pericles, "consider  then that her glories were purchased by valiant men, and by men who  learned their duty." That is the source of all greatness in all  societies, and it is the key to progress in our time.

     The second  danger is that of expediency; of those who say that hopes and beliefs  must bend before immediate necessities. Of course, if we would act  effectively we must deal with the world as it is. We must get things  done. But if there was one thing President Kennedy stood for that  touched the most profound feelings of young people around the world,  it was the belief that idealism, high aspirations, and deep  convictions are not incompatible with the most practical and efficient  of programs--that there is no basic inconsistency between ideals and  realistic possibilities, no separation between the deepest desires of  heart and of mind and the rational application of human effort to  human problems. It is not realistic or hardheaded to solve problems  and take action unguided by ultimate moral aims and values, although  we all know some who claim that it is so. In my judgment, it is  thoughtless folly. For it ignores the realities of human faith and of  passion and of belief--forces ultimately more powerful than all of the  calculations of our economists or of our generals. Of course to adhere  to standards, to idealism, to vision in the face of immediate dangers  takes great courage and takes self-confidence. But we also know that  only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly.

     It is this  new idealism which is also, I believe, the common heritage of a  generation which has learned that while efficiency can lead to the  camps at Auschwitz, or the streets of Budapest, only the ideals of  humanity and love can climb the hills of the Acropolis.

     A third  danger is timidity. Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of  their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their  society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or  great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of  those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to  change. Aristotle tells us that "At the Olympic games it is not  the finest and the strongest men who are crowned, but they who enter  the lists.... So too in the life of the honorable and the good it is  they who act rightly who win the prize." I believe that in this  generation those with the courage to enter the moral conflict will  find themselves with companions in every corner of the world.

     For the  fortunate among us, the fourth danger is comfort, the temptation to  follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial  success so grandly spread before those who have the privilege of  education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us.  There is a Chinese curse which says "May he live in interesting times." Like it or not we live in interesting times. They are  times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also more open to the  creative energy of men than any other time in history. And everyone  here will ultimately be judged--will ultimately judge himself--on the  effort he has contributed to building a new world society and the  extent to which his ideals and goals have shaped that effort.

     So we part,  I to my country and you to remain. We are--if a man of forty can claim  that privilege--fellow members of the world's largest younger  generation. Each of us have our own work to do. I know at times you  must feel very alone with your problems and difficulties. But I want  to say how impressed I am with what you stand for and the effort you  are making; and I say this not just for myself, but for men and women  everywhere. And I hope you will often take heart from the knowledge  that you are joined with fellow young people in every land, they struggling with their problems and you with yours, but all joined in a  common purpose; that, like the young people of my own country and of  every country I have visited, you are all in many ways more closely  united to the brothers of your time than to the older generations of  any of these nations; and that you are determined to build a better  future. President Kennedy was speaking to the young people of America,  but beyond them to young people everywhere, when he said that  "the energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this  endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow  from that fire can truly light the world."

     And, he  added, "With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history  the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we  love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth  God's work must truly be our own."