Adapted from Robert F. Kennedy’s address to the National Union of South African Students’ Day of Affirmation, delivered June 6, 1966.

1 We stand here in the name of freedom.

2 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.

3 The first element of this individual liberty is the freedom of speech.

4 The right to express and communicate ideas, to set oneself apart from the dumb beasts of field and forest; to recall governments to their duties and obligations; above all, the right to affirm one’s membership and allegiance to the body politic—to society—to the men with whom we share our land, our heritage and our children’s future.

5 Hands in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard —to share the decisions of government which shape men’s lives. Everything that makes life worthwhile—family, work, education, a place to rear one’s children and a place to rest one’s head—all this rests 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 those of a particular religion, or a particular race; but to all its people.

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

7 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.”

8 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.

9 In the last five years, the winds of change have blown as fiercely in the United States as anywhere in the world. But they will not—they cannot—abate.

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

11 But an African 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 the races.

12 We must recognize the full human equality of all 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 the laws of God and man command it, although they do command it; 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.

13 And this must be our commitment outside our borders as well as within.

14 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.

15 Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shadowed by the vagaries of history and 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 concerns and hopes for the future. There is discrimination in New York, apartheid in South Africa and serfdom in the mountains of Peru. People stagnate in the streets of India; intellectuals go to jail in Russia; thousands are slaughtered in Indonesia; wealth is lavished on armaments everywhere. These are differing evils. But they are
common works of man.

16 And therefore they call upon common qualities of conscience and of indignation, a shared determination to wipe away the unnecessary sufferings of our fellow human beings at home and particularly around the world.