“Your generation, south and north, white and black, is the first with the chance, not only to remedy the mistakes, which all of us have made in the past, but to transcend them. Your generation, this generation, cannot afford to waste its substance and its hope in the struggles of the past, for beyond these walls is a world to be helped and improved and made safe for the welfare of mankind.

And what a world it is. Since I graduated from high school, the United States has fought in two wars and is now involved in a third. Nuclear weapons have been invented and tested, and they have now spread to five nations. The great colonial empires of Europe have been dissolved, and more than seventy new nations have now been created. We begin to learn how to deal with one great hostile power, the Soviet Union, and then beyond its borders, the Empire of China begins to grow in significance and in danger. And in every continent…men claim their right to share in the bounty which modern knowledge can bring, and they claim also, the justice, which they have heard, proclaimed in that document, which listed the inalienable rights of man.

I have seen scrawled on the sidewalks of Indonesia and on the walls of Africa and Latin America, not ‘workers of world unite,’ but ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘give me liberty or give me death.’ They draw their hope for change and for a better life from the example of the United States. They look to us for hope and for help, and the real question before you, before all young Americans, is whether we will help bring about that future or whether we will not help and stand by. In such a challenging world, such a fantastic and dangerous world, we will not find answers in old dogmas, by repeating outworn slogans, or fighting on ancient battlegrounds, against fading enemies, long after the real struggle has moved on. We ourselves much change in order to master change. We must rethink our old ideas and beliefs, before they capture and before they destroy us.

For those answers, America must look to its young people, the children of this time of change. And we look especially to that privileged minority of educated men and women, who are the students of this country.”

-Senator Robert Francis Kennedy, The University of Mississippi, March 18th, 1966.

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