Subject: Day of Affirmation Address (news release text version) - John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum
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Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 16:11:47 -0500

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Kennedy Speeches >Day of Affirmation Address (news release text version)
Day of Affirmation Address (news release text version)
Listen to the audio of this speech here.

Robert F. Kennedy
University of Capetown
Capetown, South Africa
June 6, 1966
(News Release Text)
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.
The first element of this individual liberty is the freedom of speech:  
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.
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."
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