If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and
Christian love, when the history books are written in future
generations, the historians will have to pause and say, "There
lived a great people - a black people - who injected new meaning
and dignity into the veins of civilization." This is our
challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Address to Holt Street Baptist Church,
5 December 1955. |
Every human life is a reflection of divinity, and... every
act of injustice mars and defaces the image of God in man.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?,
1967. |
President Lyndon Johnson's high spirits were marked as he
circulated among the many guests whom he had invited to witness
an event he confidently felt to be historic, the signing of
the 1965 Voting Rights Act....The bill that lay on the polished
mahogany desk was born in violence in Selma, Alabama, where
a stubborn sheriff...had stumbled against the future.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?,
1967. |
Liberalism provided me with an intellectual satisfaction that
I never found in fundamentalism. I became so enamored of the
insights of liberalism that I almost fell into the trap of accepting
uncritically everything it encompassed.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Strength to Love, 1963. |
A second basic fact that characterizes nonviolence is that
it does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to
win his friendship and understanding.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,
1958. |
Nonviolent resistance makes it possible for the Negro to remain
in the South and struggle for his rights. The Negro's problem
will not be solved by running away.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,
1958. |
As I like to say to the people in Montgomery: "The tension
in this city is not between white people and Negro people. The
tension is, at bottom, between justice and injustice, between
the forces of light and the forces of darkness."
Martin Luther King Jr.
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,
1958. |
There is such a thing as the freedom of exhaustion. Some people
are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up....The
oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to
slumber....To accept injustice or segregation passively is to
say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,
1958. |
We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles
of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices
of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly
practice the very opposite of the democratic creed....This strange
dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is,
represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Strength to Love, 1963. |
The Christian faith makes it possible for us nobly to accept
that which cannot be changed, and to meet disappointments and
sorrow with an inner poise, and to absorb the most intense pain
without abandoning our sense of hope.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Strength to Love, 1963. |
The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds
and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we
have allowed them to become invisible.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Nobel Prize lecture, 11 Dec 1964. |
Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is
a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon
where no people live, while only a fraction of that amount is
appropriated to service the densely populated slums.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?,
1967. |
But while so many white Americans are unaware of conditions
inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are
unaware of the life outside. The television sets bombard them
day by day with the opulence of the larger society.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?,
1967. |
Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the
modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing
security of being identified with the majority.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Strength to Love, 1963. |
Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction
that the Negro can't win... the view that American society is
so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no
possibility of salvation from within.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?,
1967. |
There may have been a time when war served as a negative good
by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the
destructive power of modern weapons eliminates even the possibility
that war may serve as a negative good.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Strength to Love, 1963. |
A world war - God forbid! - will leave only smoldering ashes
as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably
to untimely death. Yet there are those who sincerely feel that
disarmament is an evil and international negotiation is an abominable
waste of time.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Strength to Love, 1963. |
But alas! Science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist
is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science
gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal
suicide.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Strength to Love, 1963. |
Perhaps only his sense of humor and irony can save him when
he hears the most powerful nation in the world speaking of his
aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor weak nation
more than eight thousand miles away from its shores.
Martin Luther King Jr.
About Ho Chi Minh, Beyond Vietnam lecture,
4 April 1968. |
We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women....When
we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach
for a sponge provided for us by a Pacific Islander. We reach
for soap that is created for us by a Frenchman. The towel is
provided by a Turk. Then at the table we drink coffee which
is provided for us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese,
or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for our jobs, we
are beholden to more than half the world.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Strength to Love, 1963. |
It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid
fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice,
the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary
spirit of the modern world have now become the arch-antirevolutionaries.
Martin Luther King Jr.
The Trumpet of Conscience, 1968. |
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3 Martin Luther
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