Remarks to Members of the Bishops' Council, African Methodist Episcopal Church.

I WANT to thank you very much for your visit this morning. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to welcome you here at the White House.

We have had a rather busy morning. I spent some time reviewing with the Governor of Hawaii not only developments in his State, but the revolution that is taking place in the entire continent of Asia. He is going there today to represent me as President of the United States.

I visited with Mr. Malik, the Foreign Minister of Indonesia. As you know, Indonesia has come back into the United Nations. He was reporting to me on the developments in that country and the progress the freedom-loving people have recently made in that entire area of the world.

I delayed somewhat meeting with you because I had a rather extended session with the Chancellor of Germany. We were talking about what we could do together not only to improve the lot of our own citizens, but how we could marshal our resources to give guidance, leadership, and support to the underdeveloped nations and to all nations throughout the world.

I had the privilege of going to church Sunday with two of my daughters. The first one was to a little Catholic church across the river from my ranch house where Luci took me at 8 o'clock in the morning. I wish they would rearrange their meeting hours, because when you are on a weekend that is a little early.

It is just a mission now. They are going to have their own priest very soon and then, they tell me, they will have a little later service. But it did permit me to go a little later in the day to an Episcopalian service some 30 miles away. The similarity of the two sermons struck me because they were both in essence based on "love thy neighbor as thyself."

In this day and age when we have so many critical problems in this evolution that we are undergoing confronting society, I think it is constantly necessary for all of us to engage in some introspection and to see that we are as selfless as possible, that we really try to live with all of you in conjunction with "love thy neighbor as thyself." And that is what we are trying to do in this world.

This house is never happier than when it honors freedom and when it acknowledges leadership. That is my reason for asking you to come here today.

I think you represent both freedom and leadership. You are not only a force for spiritual enlightenment throughout this Nation, but for years you have been well known as a force for better social conditions, better housing, better education, and better health. You have been leaders, with me, in our war on poverty and certainly in the battle for human rights.

During the period in which we live, when the chroniclers of history record our adventures, advances, our achievements, if any, I hope that we can proudly, through our descendants, point to this era as the period when we made the greatest advance in human rights.

We have made the greatest progress for food production and supply of the nutriments and needs of the human body. We have made the greatest success in finding ways and means, methods, procedures and wherewithals to help our bodies and to give us maximum life and length of life. And we have made the major contributions and major advances in the field of education.

Now the cry for freedom is not new in our Nation. We went through a similar period, a very hectic one, more than 100 years ago.

But in the last few years this cry has had a new sound and a louder and more insistent one. It has become so strong that the people of this Nation and the world no longer can ignore it.

I think the people of the United States have been listening. I think it is one of the glories of the civil rights movement that when Negro citizens have raised the freedom cry they have usually started raising it from the church pulpit.

I was happy to see these two separate denominations where I went to church Sunday. Both of them spoke at some length on discrimination, on equality, and on the necessity of loving thy neighbor, whether he was black or brown or red or white, as thyself.

So the story of our progress in civil rights is the story of the pulpit, as well as the story of congressional battles.

I think the churches have great reason to be proud of the leadership that they have developed and that they have presented.

Headquarters for the battle in almost every community have always been a church and often an AME church. The generals in these battles are the leaders.

The battle cry was not a shout, it was a song. The victory was not conquest, but was reason and reconciliation. And most of you wore no uniforms, but I read somewhere about the armor of truth and the breastplate of righteousness.

Today we have entered a new phase. The Negro citizens are no longer appealing just for equality. They know that justice requires it. This is as it should be.

But if a just appeal, which is fair and a just appeal which is right has an ugly sound, we may lose more than we gain.

So what if the cry for freedom becomes a sound of a brick cracking through a store window, turning over an automobile in the street, or throwing of rocks, or the sound of the mob, or the sound of violence and the yells of frustration, and the bitter inflection is from a body that hates?

If that sound should drown out the voices of reason, frustration will replace progress and all of our best work will be undone.

So you must help me to see that that just does not happen in this country. We are not getting at that job any too early, either. I believe we can prevent it.

I want to do all I can to prevent it by making the sound of leadership louder and clearer. Let that leadership drown out the sounds of violence.

I am dependent on you leaders to help. There are other issues, I think, that we are going to write in the history of the sixties-like housing, urban progress, conservation, education, and health, and a dozen others.

Every one of these issues has its moral and spiritual dimensions and its political dimensions as well.

I would not tell you and your members to vote for this candidate or that one, but I would presume to tell you to vote.

I hope that your great voice of leadership, and your ministers in pulpits across the land, will urge all of your members to live up to their responsibilities as citizens of this country; their responsibilities not just to the church, but in the schools and communities and in the social life and in the government life, to really utilize the freedom that you have sought in a great many respects and what you have gained.

What good does it do us if we seek freedom and secure it and then do not utilize it?

There may be some in your own congregation who say that preachers shouldn't do that; that they should stay in the church and stay out of any socially conscious movements, poverty programs, community developments, or political meetings.

I hope you will tell them this for me: Tell them that in this age the church cannot afford to stand aside from the great problems of our times. The church is interested in the health of the child, in the education of the child, in the surroundings of that child, and whether it can sleep without rats biting him, whether it can breathe without breathing polluted air, whether it has a recreation area where it can play without knowing that juvenile delinquents are in the neighborhood.

Because if the preachers in this country step aside from politics and community life and leadership and social problems, then who steps in? If the good men of the church have no business in these causes, who is left to do that business?

I have never heard a satisfactory answer to those questions.

So I am glad that you came to see me. Your visit gives me an opportunity to make a request of you and also to make a promise to you.

My promise is this: As long as I am the President I am going to use my pulpit to help bring these issues to the people, to the attention of the people of the world and the people of this country.

We are going to believe in education, health, conservation, food, increasing our life expectancy, and increasing our standards of living here at home. What is good for Paul and Silas, is good for the people of the world, too.

So we are going to try to set a good example by associating ourselves with other nations and making part of our resources to provide technical leadership in health, education, and food production and so forth to relieve starving humanity.

The request I make of you after I promise to use my own pulpit is this: Since I have only one pulpit--and sometimes it gets limited--you have 7,000. So I would like to admonish you and remind you that your Nation, your country, and the men who are fighting to protect your freedom that you enjoy, including freedom lovers everywhere, need your help.

I hope that you will give it to us. So go out from these 7,000 pulpits of the land and say a new and better day is dawning, a stronger people is developing, a more secure society is on the horizon, and we are getting excited for that Promised Land.