Book notes #13 — The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

A continuation of concise book reviews, with original context here.

Edit: Nov 29, 2020 — after a few years of doing this, I’ve updated my formatting to this Google Spreadsheet where I’ll log new books plus short reviews and the occasional highlights.

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.- Edited by Clayborne Carson

The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Stream of consciousness review:

MLK Jr has always been one of those figures who I knew to respect and admire for many obvious reasons, but I never fully researched the depth of admiration I should have. After reading this book, the admiration and respect only heightened. This biography naturally weaves his life story in with the chronology and events of the Civil Rights Movement. Leveraging many of his own words and writing, we are given an inside look into the way MLK Jr operated and the values for which he stood.

We also are shown insight into some of the people he respected most — Mahatma Gandhi being near the top of that list. Their shared commitment to nonviolent protest as a means to make change is only one of the many parallels one can draw between these two storied men.

The Autobiography of MLK Jr has no shortage of quotes and parables to draw from. It should be noted that this is not a true “autobiography” in that it was commissioned by MLK’s family and written by Clayborne Carson, though incorporates much of MLK’s own writing and views. I was left inspired, educated, and entertained. Perhaps most profoundly, this book unintentionally displays how life in the 1950s and in the 2020s are not as far apart as one would hope.

The unfortunate reality is there are many aspects of MLK’s agenda that are as applicable today as they were then. For that reason and many more, it’s a must read.

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Raw highlights (directly from the book), some favorites in bold:

I think that my strong determination for justice comes from the very strong, dynamic personality of my father, and I would hope that the gentle aspect comes from a mother who is very gentle and sweet.

My mother confronted the age-old problem of the Negro parent in America: how to explain discrimination and segregation to a small child.

She taught me that I should feel a sense of “somebodiness” but that on the other hand I had to go out and face a system that stared me in the face every day saying you are “less than,” you are “not equal to.”

From before I was born, he had refused to ride the city buses after witnessing a brutal attack on a load of Negro passengers.

I guess I accepted biblical studies uncritically until I was about twelve years old. But this uncritical attitude could not last long, for it was contrary to the very nature of my being.

but every time I got on that bus I left my mind up on the front seat. And I said to myself, “One of these days, I’m going to put my body up there where my mind is.”

I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.

Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort, I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me.

Here I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro.

It was hard to understand why I could ride wherever I pleased on the train from New York to Washington and then had to change to a Jim Crow car at the nation’s capital in order to continue the trip to Atlanta.

There was a free atmosphere at Morehouse, and it was there I had my first frank discussion on race.

During my student days I read Henry David Thoreau’s essay “On Civil Disobedience” for the first time.

Here, in this courageous New Englander’s refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery’s territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance.

I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.

No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau.

The wholesome relations we had in the Intercollegiate Council convinced me that we had many white persons as allies, particularly among the younger generation.

It is fair to remember that almost the total of race mixture in America has come, not at Negro initiative, but by the acts of those very white men who talk loudest of race purity.

I often say that if we, as a people, had as much religion in our hearts and souls as we have in our legs and feet, we could change the world.

I had been brought up in the church and knew about religion, but I wondered whether it could serve as a vehicle to modern thinking, whether religion could be intellectually respectable as well as emotionally satisfying.

This conflict continued until I studied a course in Bible in which I came to see that behind the legends and myths of the Book were many profound truths which one could not escape.

I guess the influence of my father had a great deal to do with my going into the ministry. This is not to say that he ever spoke to me in terms of being a minister but that my admiration for him was the great moving factor. He set forth a noble example that I didn’t mind following.

I was well aware of the typical white stereotype of the Negro, that he is always late, that he’s loud and always laughing, that he’s dirty and messy, and for a while I was terribly conscious of trying to avoid identification with it. If I were a minute late to class, I was almost morbidly conscious of it and sure that everyone else noticed it. Rather than be thought of as always laughing, I’m afraid I was grimly serious for a time. I had a tendency to overdress, to keep my room spotless, my shoes perfectly shined, and my clothes immaculately pressed.

It well has been said: “A religion that ends with the individual, ends.”

There is a great paradox in preaching: on the one hand it may be very helpful and on the other it may be very pernicious.

I think that preaching should grow out of the experiences of the people. Therefore, I, as a minister, must know the problems of the people that I am pastoring.

It is my conviction that the minister must somehow take profound theological and philosophical views and place them in a concrete framework.

I must forever make the complex the simple.

Above all, I see the preaching ministry as a dual process. On the one hand I must attempt to change the soul of individuals so that their societies may be changed. On the other I must attempt to change the societies so that the individual soul will have a change.

During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people.

History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter.

Since for the Community there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything — force, violence, murder, lying — is a justifiable means to the “millennial” end.

Constructive ends can never give absolute moral justification to destructive means, because in the final analysis the end is preexistent in the means.

Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism the individual ends up in subjection to the state. True, the Marxist would argue that the state is an “interim” reality which is to be eliminated when the classless society emerges; but the state is the end while it lasts, and man only a means to that end. And if any man’s so-called rights or liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside.

His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted. Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state.

Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man.

Communism in theory emphasized a classless society, and a concern for social justice, though the world knows from sad experience that in practice it created new classes and a new lexicon of injustice.

Marx had revealed the danger of the profit motive as the sole basis of an economic system: capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life.

We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity.

Historically capitalism failed to see the truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise.

Like most of the students of Crozer, I felt that while war could never be a positive or absolute good, it could serve as a negative good in the sense of preventing the spread and growth of an evil force.

How often has religion gone down, chained to a status quo it allied itself with.

Perhaps my faith in love was temporarily shaken by the philosophy of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche’s glorification of power — in his theory, all life expressed the will to power — was an outgrowth of his contempt for ordinary mortals.

Like most people, I had heard of Gandhi, but I had never studied him seriously.

The whole concept of Satyagraha (Satya is truth which equals love, and agraha is force; Satyagraha, therefore, means truth force or love force) was profoundly significant to me.

Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships. The “turn the other cheek” philosophy and the “love your enemies” philosophy were only valid, I felt, when individuals were in conflict with other individuals; when racial groups and nations were in conflict a more realistic approach seemed necessary.

The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contracts theory of Hobbes, the “back to nature” optimism of Rousseau, the superman philosophy of Nietzsche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Gandhi.

I was absolutely convinced of the natural goodness of man and the natural power of human reason.

The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin causes us to use our minds to rationalize our actions.

Reason, devoid of the purifying power of faith, can never free itself from distortions and rationalizations.

Of course there is one phase of liberalism that I hope to cherish always: its devotion to the search for truth, its insistence on an open and analytical mind, its refusal to abandon the best light of reason.

My study of Gandhi convinced me that true pacifism is not nonresistance to evil, but nonviolent resistance to evil.

Between the two positions, there is a world of difference.

True pacifism is not unrealistic submission to evil power, as Niebuhr contends. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.

After reading Niebuhr, I tried to arrive at a realistic pacifism. In other words, I came to see the pacifist position not as sinless but as the lesser evil in the circumstances.

It seems to be an experience, the lack of which life becomes dull and meaningless.

can remember very vividly how in my recent seminary days, I was able to strengthen my spiritual life through communing with nature.

Henry Ward Beecher was right: “Nature is God’s tongue.”

It was mainly under these teachers that I studied Personalistic philosophy — the theory that the clue to the meaning of ultimate reality is found in personality.

His analysis of the dialectical process, in spite of its shortcomings, helped me to see that growth comes through struggle.

One of the main tenets of this philosophy was the conviction that nonviolent resistance was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their quest for social justice.

As a young man with most of my life ahead of me, I decided early to give my life to something eternal and absolute. Not to these little gods that are here today and gone tomorrow. But to God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

I didn’t want a wife I couldn’t communicate with. I had to have a wife who would be as dedicated as I was.

My wife was always stronger than I was through the struggle.

I never could quite get the idea out of my mind that I should do some teaching, yet I felt a great deal of satisfaction with the pastorate.

on February 18, on the steps of the portico, Jefferson Davis took his oath of office as President of the Confederate States. For this reason, Montgomery has been known across the years as the Cradle of the Confederacy.

said to myself over and over again, “Keep Martin Luther King in the background and God in the foreground and everything will be all right. Remember you are a channel of the gospel and not the source.”

I arose early on Sunday morning — a custom I follow every Sunday in order to have an hour of quiet meditation.

The Length of Life, as we shall use it, is not its duration, not its longevity. It is rather the push of a life forward to its personal ends and ambitions.

It is the inward concern for one’s personal welfare. The Breadth of Life is the outward concern for the welfare of others. The Height of Life is the upward reach toward God. These are the three dimensions of life, and, without the due development of all, no life becomes complete.

Life at its best is a great triangle.

We came to the conclusion that we had something of a moral obligation to return — at least for a few years.

The South, after all, was our home.

I come to you with nothing so special to offer. I have no pretense to being a great preacher or even a profound scholar. I certainly have no pretense to infallibility — that is reserved for the height of the Divine, rather than the depth of the human. At every moment, I am conscious of my finiteness, knowing so clearly that I have never been bathed in the sunshine of omniscience or baptized in the waters of omnipotence.

Whenever the church, consciously or unconsciously, caters to one class it loses the spiritual force of the “whoso-ever will, let him come” doctrine, and is in danger of becoming little more than a social club with a thin veneer of religiosity.

I rose every morning at five-thirty and spent three hours writing the thesis, returning to it late at night for another three hours. The remainder of the day was given to church work, including, besides the weekly service, marriages, funerals, and personal conferences.

I would remember that occasion so long as the cords of memory would lengthen.

I took an active part in current social problems. I insisted that every church member become a registered voter and a member of the NAACP and organized within the church a social and political action committee — designed to keep the congregation intelligently informed on the social, political, and economic situations.

The Negro who experiences bitter and agonizing circumstances as a result of some ungodly white person is tempted to look upon all white persons as evil, if he fails to look beyond his circumstances.

But the minute he looks beyond his circumstances and sees the whole of the situation, he discovers that some of the most implacable and vehement advocates of racial equality are consecrated white persons.

Through education we seek to change attitudes and internal feelings (prejudice, hate, etc.); through legislation and court orders we seek to regulate behavior.

Anyone who starts out with the conviction that the road to racial justice is only one lane wide will inevitably create a traffic jam and make the journey infinitely longer.

On December 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to move when she was asked to get up and move back by the bus operator.

She was a victim of both the forces of history and the forces of destiny. Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned to her by history.

“We have taken this type of thing too long already,” Nixon concluded, his voice trembling. “I feel that the time has come to boycott the buses. Only through a boycott can we make it clear to the white folks that we will not accept this type of treatment any longer.”

Our final message read as follows: Don’t ride the bus to work, to town, to school, or any place Monday, December 5.

He would have frequently noticed Negro passengers getting on at the front door and paying their fares, and then being forced to get off and go to the back doors to board the bus, and often he would have noticed that before the Negro passenger could get to the back door, the bus rode off with his fare in the box.

I had to recognize that the boycott method could be used to unethical and unchristian ends. I had to concede, further, that this was the method used so often by White Citizens’ Councils to deprive many Negroes, as well as white persons of goodwill, of the basic necessities of life.

Our concern would not be to put the bus company out of business, but to put justice in business.

As I thought further, I came to see that what we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our support from the bus company.

We were simply saying to the white community, “We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system.” From this moment on I conceived of our movement as an act of massive noncooperation.

Coretta and I agreed that if we could get 60 percent cooperation the protest would be a success.

Instead of the 60 percent cooperation we had hoped for, it was becoming apparent that we had reached almost 100 percent.

A miracle had taken place. The once dormant and quiescent Negro community was now fully awake.

Leaving Mrs. Parks’s trial, Ralph Abernathy, E. D. Nixon, and Rev. E. N. French — then minister of the Hilliard Chapel A.M.E.

Zion Church — discussed the need for some organization to guide and direct the protest.

These men were wise enough to see that the moment had now come for a clearer order and direction.

They probably picked me because I had not been in town long enough to be identified with any particular group or clique.

“We are acting like little boys,” he said. “Somebody’s name will have to be known, and if we are afraid we might just as well fold up right now. We must also be men enough to discuss our recommendations in the open; this idea of secretly passing something around on paper is a lot of bunk.

The white folks are eventually going to find it out anyway. We’d better decide now if we are going to be fearless men or scared boys.”

how could I make a speech that would be militant enough to keep my people aroused to positive action and yet moderate enough to keep this fervor within controllable and Christian bounds?

The question of calling off the protest was now academic. The enthusiasm of these thousands of people swept everything along like an onrushing tidal wave.

You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.

If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong.

I want to say that in all of our actions we must stick together. Unity is the great need of the hour, and if we are united we can get many of the things that we not only desire but which we justly deserve.

There is never a time in our American democracy that we must ever think we’re wrong when we protest. We reserve that right.

The people had been as enthusiastic when I urged them to love as they were when I urged them to protest.

called upon the Negroes not to resume riding the buses until (1) courteous treatment by the bus operators was guaranteed; (2) passengers were seated on a first-come, first-served basis — Negroes seating from the back of the bus toward the front, whites from the front toward the back; (3) Negro bus operators were employed on predominantly Negro routes.

No historian would ever be able fully to describe this meeting and no sociologist would ever be able to interpret it adequately. One had to be a part of the experience really to understand it.

Little did we know on that night that we were starting a movement that would rise to international proportions;

It is one of the ironies of our day that Montgomery, the Cradle of the Confederacy, is being transformed into Montgomery, the cradle of freedom and justice.

From the beginning of the protest Ralph Abernathy was my closest associate and most trusted friend. We prayed together and made important decisions together.

Thousands of mimeographed leaflets were distributed throughout the Negro community with a list of the forty-eight dispatch and the forty-two pick-up stations.

The act of walking, for many, had become of symbolic importance.

“Jump in, Grandmother,” he said. “You don’t need to walk.” She waved him on. “I’m not walking for myself,” she explained. “I’m walking for my children and my grandchildren.”

At least three white men from the air bases drove in the pool during their off-duty hours.

the phrase most often heard was “Christian love.” It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than a doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action.

As the days unfolded, however, the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi began to exert its influence. I had come to see early that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom.

Nonviolent resistance had emerged as the technique of the movement, while love stood as the regulating ideal.

Still others felt that they could be nonviolent only if they were not attacked personally. They would say: “If nobody bothers me, I will bother nobody. If nobody hits me, I will hit nobody. But if I am hit I will hit back.” They thus drew a moral line between aggressive and retaliatory violence.

We were sure, however, that the Rosa Parks case, which was by then in the courts, would be the test that would ultimately bring about the defeat of bus segregation itself.

I soon saw that I was the victim of an unwarranted pessimism because I had started out with an unwarranted optimism.

I had gone to the meeting with a great illusion. I had believed that the privileged would give up their privileges on request.

I came to see that no one gives up his privileges without strong resistance.

I saw further that the underlying purpose of segregation was to oppress and exploit the segregated, not simply to keep them apart.

Justice and equality, I saw, would never come while segregation remained, because the basic purpose of segregation was to perpetuate injustice and inequality.

By trying to convince the Negroes that I was the main obstacle to a solution, the white committee members had hoped to divide us among ourselves.

“You must be willing to suffer the anger of the opponent, and yet not return anger. You must not become bitter. No matter how emotional your opponents are, you must be calm.”

It was now about eleven o’clock on Saturday night. Something had to be done to let the people know that the article they would read the next morning was false. I asked one group to call all the Negro ministers of the city and urge them to announce in church Sunday morning that the protest was still on. Another group joined me on a tour of the Negro nightclubs and taverns to inform those present of the false statement.

As the weeks passed, I began to see that many of the threats were in earnest.

For the first time I realized that something could happen to me.

“If one day you find me sprawled out dead, I do not want you to retaliate with a single act of violence.

With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward.

But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now, I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. Now, I am afraid. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.

At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. Almost at once my fears began to go.

I called three of my closest associates and urged them to tell me what had happened. I assured them that I was prepared for whatever it was. Ralph Abernathy said hesitantly, “Your house has been bombed.”

As I walked toward the front porch, I realized that many people were armed. Nonviolent resistance was on the verge of being transformed into violence.

“You may express your regrets, but you must face the fact that your public statements created the atmosphere for this bombing. This is the end result of your ‘get-tough’ policy.”

He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.

I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house. When I decided that I couldn’t keep a gun, I came face-to-face with the question of death and I dealt with it. From that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid.

We came to see that, in the long run, it is more honorable to walk in dignity than ride in humiliation.

For more than thirteen weeks they had walked, and sacrificed, and worn down their cars.

As we drove toward my parents’ home, my father said that he thought it would be unwise for me to return to Montgomery now. “Although many others have been indicted,” he said, “their main concern is to get you. They might even put you in jail without a bond.”

No one had tried to evade arrest.

Those who had previously trembled before the law were now proud to be arrested for the cause of freedom.

Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face. But I left with a smile. I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime.

What the opposition failed to see was that our mutual sufferings had wrapped us all in a single garment of destiny. What happened to one happened to all.

My great prayer is always for God to save me from the paralysis of crippling fear, because I think when a person lives with the fears of the consequences for his personal life he can never do anything in terms of lifting the whole of humanity and solving many of the social problems which we confront in every age and every generation.

Through all of these trying and difficult days, Coretta remained amazingly calm and even-tempered.

She always insisted on coming back and staying with the struggle to the end.

I am convinced that if I had not had a wife with the fortitude, strength, and calmness of Coretta, I could not have stood up amid the ordeals and tensions surrounding the Montgomery movement.

If it had been possible to give Negro children the same number of schools proportionately and the same type of buildings as white children, the Negro children would have still confronted inequality in the sense that they would not have had the opportunity of communicating with all children.

You see, equality is not only a matter of mathematics and geometry, but it’s a matter of psychology.

it is possible to have quantitative equality and qualitative inequality. The doctrine of separate but equal can never be.

Tuesday, November 13, 1956, will always remain an important and ironic date in the history of the Montgomery bus protest. On that day two historic decisions were rendered — one to do away with the pool; the other to remove the underlying conditions that made it necessary.

The eight thousand men and women who crowded in and around the two churches were in high spirits.

The prevailing theme was that “we must not take this as a victory over the white man, but as a victory for justice and democracy.”

As we go back to the buses let us be loving enough to turn an enemy into a friend.

I asked Ralph Abernathy, E. D. Nixon, and Glenn Smiley to join me in riding on the first integrated bus.

“The calm but cautious acceptance of this significant change in Montgomery’s way of life came without any major disturbance.”

It also provided a method for Negroes to struggle to secure moral ends through moral means.

Ultimately, victory in Montgomery came with the United States Supreme Court’s decision; however, in a real sense, the victory had already come to the boycotters, who had proven to themselves, the community, and the world that Negroes could join in concert and sustain collective action against segregation, carrying it through until the desired objective was reached.

Discouraged, and still revolted by the bombings, for some strange reason I began to feel a personal sense of guilt for everything that was happening. In this mood I went to the mass meeting on Monday night. There for the first time, I broke down in public.

Then, in the grip of an emotion I could not control, I said, “Lord, I hope no one will have to die as a result of our struggle for freedom in Montgomery. Certainly I don’t want to die. But if anyone has to die, let it be me.” The audience was in an uproar. Shouts and cries of “no, no” came from all sides. So intense was the reaction, that I could not go on with my prayer. Two of my fellow ministers came to the pulpit and suggested that I take a seat. For a few minutes I stood with their arms around me, unable to move. Finally, with the help of my friends, I sat down. It was this scene that caused the press to report mistakenly that I had collapsed.

The men had signed confessions. But in spite of all the evidence, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

When you are aware that you are a symbol, it causes you to search your soul constantly — to go through this job of self-analysis, to see if you live up to the high and noble principles that people surround you with, and to try at all times to keep the gulf between the public self and the private self at a minimum.

Help me, O God, to see that I’m just a symbol of a movement.

The social upheavals of the two world wars, the Great Depression, and the spread of the automobile had made it both possible and necessary for the Negro to move away from his former isolation on the rural plantation. The decline of agriculture and the parallel growth of industry had drawn large numbers of Negroes to urban centers and brought about a gradual improvement in their economic status.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF FAME One of the frustrations of any young man is to approach the heights at such an early age. The average man reaches this point maybe in his late forties or early fifties. But when you reach it so young, your life becomes a kind of decrescendo. You feel yourself fading from the screen at a time you should just be starting to work toward your goal. Frankly, I’m worried to death. A man who hits the peak at twenty-seven has a tough job ahead. People will be expecting me to pull rabbits out of the hat for the rest of my life. If I don’t or there are no rabbits to be pulled, then they’ll say I’m no good. Quoted in the New York Post, April 14, 1957

This growing self-respect has inspired the Negro with a new determination to struggle and sacrifice until first-class citizenship becomes a reality. This is the true meaning of the Montgomery Story.

The reality of segregation, like slavery, has always had to confront the ideals of democracy and Christianity.

Indeed, segregation and discrimination are strange paradoxes in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal.

In the midst of the tragic breakdown of law and order, the executive branch of the government is all too silent and apathetic.

I had come to see that one of the most decisive steps that the Negro could take was a short walk to the voting booth.

I believe firmly in nonviolence, but, at the same time, I am not an anarchist. I believe in the intelligent use of police force.

He showed the nation and the world that the United States was a nation dedicated to law and order rather than mob rule.

Nevertheless, it was strange to me that the federal government was more concerned about what happened in Budapest than what happened in Birmingham.

It says to us first that the oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed.

Nkrumah stood up and made his closing speech to Parliament with the little cap that he wore in prison for several months and the coat that he wore in prison for several months. Often the path to freedom will carry you through prison.

He always realized that colonialism was made for domination and exploitation. It was made to keep a certain group down and exploit that group economically for the advantage of another. He studied and thought about all of this, and one day he decided to go back to Africa.

When I hear, “People aren’t ready,” that’s like telling a person who is trying to swim, “Don’t jump in that water until you learn how to swim.” When actually you will never learn how to swim until you get in the water.

I am often reminded of the statement made by Nkrumah: “I prefer self-government with danger to servitude with tranquility.” I think that’s a great statement.

I read a few, but one of them I will never forget. There was a letter from a young girl who was a student at the White Plains High School. It said simply, “Dear Dr. King: I am a ninth-grade student at the White Plains High School.” She said, “While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I am a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune, and of your suffering. And I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”

Your servant in the cause of Christ and Freedom, Martin Luther King, Jr.

To believe in nonviolence does not mean that violence will not be inflicted upon you.

But the strongest bond of fraternity was the common cause of minority and colonial peoples in America, Africa, and Asia struggling to throw off racism and imperialism.

Indian publications perhaps gave a better continuity of our 381-day bus strike than did most of our papers in the United States.

Maybe we spend too much of our national budget building military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding.

Great ills flowed from the poverty of India but strangely there was relatively little crime. This was another concrete manifestation of the wonderful spiritual quality of the Indian people. They were poor, jammed together, and half-starved, but they did not take it out on each other.

The bourgeoise — white, black, or brown — behaves about the same the world over.

The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle is over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.

Then we went from Trivandrum down to a point known as Cape Comorin.

Three great bodies of water meet together in all of their majestic splendor: the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean.

This is one of the few points in all the world where you can see the setting of the sun and the rising of the moon simultaneously.

Gandhi criticized himself when he needed it. And whenever he made a mistake, he confessed it publicly.

Gandhi said to his people: “If you are hit, don’t hit back; even if they shoot at you, don’t shoot back. If they curse you, don’t curse back. Just keep moving. Some of us might have to die before we get there. Some of us might be thrown in jail before we get there, but let’s just keep moving.” And they kept moving and walked and walked, and millions of them came together.

And just with a little love and understanding goodwill and a refusal to cooperate with an evil law, he was able to break the backbone of the British Empire. This, I think, was one of the most significant things that ever happened in the history of the world. More than 390 million people achieved their freedom, and they achieved it nonviolently.

They felt that nonviolent resistance could only work in a situation where the resisters had a potential ally in the conscience of the opponent.

True nonviolent resistance is not unrealistic submission to evil power. It is rather a courageous confrontation of evil by the power of love, in the faith that it is better to be the recipient of violence than the inflicter of it, since the latter only multiplies the existence of violence and bitterness in the universe, while the former may develop a sense of shame in the opponent, and thereby bring about a transformation and change of heart.

“I will refuse to eat until the leaders of the caste system will come to me with the leaders of the untouchables and say that there will be an end to untouchability and the Hindu temples of India will open their doors to the untouchables.” And he refused to eat, and days passed. Finally when Gandhi was about to breathe his last breath, and his body was all but gone, a group from the untouchables and a group from the Brahmin caste came to him and signed a statement saying that they would no longer adhere to the caste system.

prime minister admitted to me that many Indians still harbored a prejudice against these long-oppressed people, but that it had become unpopular to exhibit this prejudice in any form.

The world doesn’t like people like Gandhi. That’s strange, isn’t it? They don’t like people like Christ; they don’t like people like Lincoln. They killed him — this man who had done all of that for India, who gave his life and who mobilized and galvanized 400 million people for independence….

Here was the man of nonviolence, falling at the hands of a man of violence.

Here was a man of love falling at the hands of a man with hate. This seems the way of history. And isn’t it significant that he died on the same day that Christ died?

when Abraham Lincoln was shot, Secretary Stanton stood by and said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

“But isn’t that discrimination?” “Well, it may be,” the prime minister answered. “But this is our way of atoning for the centuries of injustices we have inflicted upon these people.”

India won her independence, but without violence on the part of Indians. The aftermath of hatred and bitterness that usually follows a violent campaign was found nowhere in India.

I hated to leave Montgomery, but the people there realized that the call from the whole South was one that could not be denied.

After returning from India I decided that I would take one day a week as a day of silence and meditation.

The young students of the South, through sit-ins and other demonstrations, gave America a glowing example of disciplined, dignified non-violent action against the system of segregation.

Spontaneously born, but guided by the theory of nonviolent resistance, the lunch counter sit-ins accomplished integration in hundreds of communities at the swiftest rate of change in the civil rights movement up to that time.

Frequently, I heard them say that if their African brothers could break the bonds of colonialism, surely the American Negro could break Jim Crow.

Whatever career you may choose for yourself — doctor, lawyer, teacher — let me propose an avocation to be pursued along with it. Become a dedicated fighter for civil rights. Make it a central part of your life. It will make you a better doctor, a better lawyer, a better teacher.

One may wonder why the movement started with the lunch counters. The answer lay in the fact that there the Negro had suffered indignities and injustices that could not be justified or explained.

The student movement finally refuted the idea that the Negro was content with segregation.

This courageous willingness to go to jail may well be the thing to awaken the dozing conscience of many of our white brothers.

I am frank to confess that on this occasion I learned that truth and conviction in the hands of a skillful advocate could make what started out as a bigoted, prejudiced jury, choose the path of justice.

I specifically mentioned a need for an executive order outlawing discrimination in federally assisted housing.

He knew that segregation was morally wrong and he certainly intellectually committed himself to integration, but I could see that he didn’t have the emotional involvement then.

For many months during the election campaign, my close friends urged me to declare my support for John Kennedy. I spent many troubled hours searching for the responsible and fair decision.

But I made very clear to him that I did not endorse candidates publicly and that I could not come to the point that I would change my views on this.

I was arrested along with some two hundred eighty students in a sit-in demonstration seeking to integrate lunch counters.

He was running for an office, and he needed to be elected, and I’m sure he felt the need for the Negro votes. So I think that he did something that expressed deep moral concern, but at the same time it was politically sound.

I had known Nixon longer. He had been supposedly close to me, and he would call me frequently about things, seeking my advice. And yet, when this moment came, it was like he had never heard of me. So this is why I really considered him a moral coward and one who was unwilling to take a courageous step and take a risk.

I also feel that Nixon would have done much more to meet the present crisis in race relations than President Eisenhower has done…. Finally, I would say that Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere.

And so I would conclude by saying that if Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.

I was grateful to Senator Kennedy for the genuine concern he expressed in my arrest. After the call I made a statement to the press thanking him but not endorsing him. Very frankly, I did not feel at that time that there was much difference between Kennedy and Nixon.

But I had to look at something else beyond the man — the people who surrounded him — and I felt that Kennedy was surrounded by better people.

It was on that basis that I felt that Kennedy would make the best president.

maintain a nonpartisan posture, which I have followed all along in order to be able to look objectively at both parties at all times.

Discrimination of all kinds had been simultaneously brought under our sights: school segregation, denial of voting rights, segregation in parks, libraries, restaurants, and buses.

As Rosa Parks triggered the Montgomery bus protest, so the arrival in December 1961 of eleven Freedom Riders had triggered the now historic nonviolent thrust in Albany.

The Freedom Rides, which were begun by the young, grew to such proportion that they eventually encompassed people of all ages.

The truth is, Albany had become a symbol of segregation’s last stand almost by chance. The ferment of a hundred years’ frustration had come to the fore.

I shall never forget the experience of seeing women over seventy, teenagers, and middle-aged adults — some with professional degrees in medicine, law, and education, some simple housekeepers and laborers — crowding the cells.

We chose to serve our time because we feel so deeply about the plight of more than seven hundred others who have yet to be tried.

Jail is depressing because it shuts off the world. It leaves one caught in the dull monotony of sameness. It is almost like being dead while one still lives. To adjust to such a meaningless existence is not easy.

The only way that I adjust to it is to constantly remind myself that this self-imposed suffering is for a great cause and purpose.

She told me that Yolanda cried when she discovered that her daddy was in jail. Somehow, I have never quite adjusted to bringing my children up under such inexplicable conditions.

Coretta developed an answer. She told them that daddy has gone to jail to help the people.

I did not appreciate the subtle and conniving tactics used to get us out of jail.

In order to demonstrate our commitment to nonviolence and our determination to keep our protest peaceful, we declare a “Day of Penance” beginning at 12 noon today. We are calling upon all members and supporters of the Albany Movement to pray for their brothers in the Negro community who have not yet found their way to the nonviolent discipline during this Day of Penance.

Quickly, they became converted to nonviolence, and without embarrassment, Sheriff Pritchett declared to the press that he too was an advocate of nonviolence.

We discussed how the Albany battle must be waged on all four fronts. A legal battle in the courts; with demonstrations and kneel-ins and sit-ins; with an economic boycott; and, finally, with an intense voter registration campaign. This is going to be a long summer.

The sermons I wrote in jail are called “A Tender Heart and A Tough Mind,” “Love in Action,” and “Loving Your Enemies.” I think I will name the book Loving Your Enemies.

It was always miserable going back to the hot cell from the air-conditioned courtroom.

I thought the federal government could do more, because basic constitutional rights were being denied.

Our movement aroused the Negro to a spirited pitch in which more than 5 percent of the Negro population voluntarily went to jail.

At the same time, about 95 percent of the Negro population boycotted buses, and shops where humiliation, not service, was offered.

To thwart us, the opposition had closed parks and libraries, but in the process, they closed them for white people as well, thus they had made their modern city little better than a rural village without recreational and cultural facilities.

If I had that to do again, I would guide that community’s Negro leadership differently than I did. The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair.

We never since scattered our efforts in a general attack on segregation, but focused upon specific, symbolic objectives.

After the “jail-ins,” the City Commission repealed the entire section of the city code that carried segregation ordinances.

When we planned our strategy for Birmingham months later, we spent many hours assessing Albany and trying to learn from its errors.

We had won a partial victory in Albany, and a partial victory to us was not an end but a beginning.

When a federal court order banned park segregation, you would find that Birmingham closed down its parks and gave up its baseball team rather than integrate them.

For although your white fellow citizens would insist that they were Christians, they practiced segregation as rigidly in the house of God as they did in the theater.

Your race, constituting two-fifths of the city’s population, would have made up one-eighth of its voting strength.

In Connor’s Birmingham, the silent password was fear. It was a fear not only on the part of the black oppressed, but also in the hearts of the white oppressors. Certainly Birmingham had its white moderates who disapproved of Bull Connor’s tactics. Certainly Birmingham had its decent white citizens who privately deplored the maltreatment of Negroes. But they remained publicly silent. It was a silence born of fear — fear of social, political, and economic reprisals. The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the bad people, but the silence of the good people.

Along with Shuttlesworth, we believed that while a campaign in Birmingham would surely be the toughest fight of our civil rights careers, it could, if successful, break the back of segregation all over the nation.

We concluded that in hard-core communities, a more effective battle could be waged if it was concentrated against one aspect of the evil and intricate system of segregation. We decided, therefore, to center the Birmingham struggle on the business community, for we knew that the Negro population had sufficient buying power so that its withdrawal could make the difference between profit and loss for many businesses.

Some 250 people had volunteered to participate in the initial demonstrations and had pledged to remain in jail at least five days.

Being prepared for a long struggle, we felt it best to begin modestly, with a limited number of arrests each day. By rationing our energies in this manner, we would help toward the buildup and drama of a growing campaign.

An important part of the mass meetings was the freedom songs.

They are adaptations of songs the slaves sang — the sorrow songs, the shouts for joy, the battle hymns, and the anthems of our movement.

I expounded on the weary and worn “outsider” charge, which we have faced in every community where we have gone to try to help. No Negro, in fact, no American, is an outsider when he goes to any community to aid the cause of freedom and justice.

I spoke from my heart, and out of each meeting came firm endorsements and pledges of participation and support.

There comes a time in the atmosphere of leadership when a man surrounded by loyal friends and allies realizes he has come face-to-face with himself and with ruthless reality. I was alone in that crowded room.

For more than twenty-four hours, I was held incommunicado, in solitary confinement. No one was permitted to visit me, not even my lawyers. Those were the longest, most frustrating and bewildering hours I have lived. Having no contact of any kind, I was besieged with worry.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own hometown.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action.

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to dramatize the issue so that it can no longer be ignored.

we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.

Reinhold Neibuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.”

that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws… Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.

It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”;

Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will.

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do-nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist.

all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.

I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.

If our drive was to be successful, we must involve the students of the community.

For the first time in the civil rights movement, we were able to put into effect the Gandhian principle: “Fill up the jails.”

The reason I can’t follow the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy is that it ends up leaving everybody blind.

I simply suggest that it was powerfully symbolic of shifting attitudes in the South that the majority of the white citizens of Birmingham remained neutral through our campaign.

Said one staunch defender of segregation, after conferring with Marshall: “There is a man who listens. I had to listen back, and I guess I grew up a little.”

The Negro in the North came to the shocking realization that the subtle and hidden discrimination of the North was as humiliating and vicious as the obvious and overt sins of the South.

A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt. A movement that changes both people and institutions is a revolution.

It was a fighting army, but no one could mistake that its most powerful weapon was love.

One writer observed that the march “brought the country’s three major religious faiths closer than any other issue in the nation’s peacetime history.”

I got in to Washington about ten o’clock and went to the hotel. I thought through what I would say, and that took an hour or so. Then I put the outline together, and I guess I finished it about midnight.

I did not finish the complete text of my speech until 4:00 A.M. on the morning of August 28.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.

Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

in the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed — we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

The march was the first organized Negro operation that was accorded respect and coverage commensurate with its importance.

I hope you can find a little consolation from the universality of this experience. Death comes to every individual. There is an amazing democracy about death. It is not an aristocracy for some of the people, but a democracy for all of the people. Kings die and beggars die; rich men die and poor men die; old people die and young people die; death comes to the innocent and it comes to the guilty. Death is the irreducible common denominator of all men.

Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance.

It revealed that President Kennedy had become a symbol of people’s yearnings for justice, economic well-being, and peace.

We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.

SCLC came to St. Augustine at the request of the local unit which was seeking: (1) a bi-racial committee; (2) desegregation of public accommodations; (3) hiring of policemen, firemen, and office workers in municipal jobs; and (4) dropping of charges against persons peacefully protesting for their constitutional rights.

As the saying goes, “Every thousand-mile journey begins with the first step.”

Therefore, he had set the twin goal of a battle against discrimination within the war on poverty.

The federal government reacts to events more quickly when a situation of conflict cries out for its intervention.

compelling the grim realization that the revolution would continue inexorably until total slavery had been replaced by total freedom.

I was urged to cancel the trip, but I decided that I had no alternative but to go on into Mississippi, because I had a job to do. If I were constantly worried about death, I could not function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility of death philosophically.

I was awakened by a telephone call from my wife. She had received a call from a New York television network. It had been announced in Oslo, Norway, by the Norwegian Parliament that I was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace for 1964.

In truth, it is these “noble” people who had won this Nobel Prize.

I am sure that many of the passengers were conscious of the pilot, the co-pilot, and the stewardesses. But, in my mind, first and foremost, was the memory of the ground crew.

And yet, if it were not for the ground crew, the struggle for human dignity and social justice would not be in orbit.

the power of the soul is greater than the might of violence.

The Nobel Prize for Peace placed a new dimension in the civil rights struggle. It reminded us graphically that the tide of world opinion was in our favor.

it is in this situation, with many of the bravest and best South Africans serving long years in prison, with some already executed; in this situation we in America and Britain have a unique responsibility. For it is we, through our investments, through our governments’ failure to act decisively, who are guilty of bolstering up the South African tyranny.

I refuse to accept the idea that the “is-ness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal “ought-ness” that forever confronts him.

I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, other-centered men can build up.

We have, it seems, shut the poor out of our minds and driven them from the mainstream of our society. We have allowed the poor to become invisible, and we have become angry when they make their presence felt. But just as nonviolence has exposed the ugliness of racial injustice, we must now find ways to expose and heal the sickness of poverty — not just its symptoms, but its basic causes.

World peace through nonviolent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed. Thus we must begin anew. Nonviolence is a good starting point.

Racial injustice around the world. Poverty. War. When man solves these three great problems he will have squared his moral progress with his scientific progress.

While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problems, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had the great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem.

Fiery, demagogic oratory in the black ghettos, urging Negroes to arm themselves and prepare to engage in violence, as he has done, can reap nothing but grief.

They did not see that there’s a great deal of difference between nonresistance to evil and nonviolent resistance.

Certainly I’m not saying that you sit down and patiently accept injustice. I’m talking about a very strong force, where you stand up with all your might against an evil system, and you’re not a coward.

Malcolm X came to the fore as a public figure partially as a result of a TV documentary entitled “The Hate That Hate Produced.” That title points clearly to the nature of Malcolm’s life and death.

I couldn’t block his coming, but my philosophy was so antithetical to the philosophy of Malcolm X that I would never have invited Malcolm X to come to Selma when we were in the midst of a nonviolent demonstration.

This says nothing about the personal respect I had for him.

expressed an interest in working more closely with the nonviolent movement, but he was not yet able to renounce violence and overcome the bitterness which life had invested in him.

In a real sense, the growth of black nationalism was symptomatic of the deeper unrest, discontent, and frustration of many Negroes because of the continued existence of racial discrimination.

And he said, “Martin, you’re right about that. I’m going to do it eventually, but I can’t get a voting rights bill through in this session of Congress.” He said, “Now, there’s some other bills that I have here that I want to get through in my Great Society program, and I think in the long run they’ll help Negroes more, as much as a voting rights bill.

The President said nothing could be done. But we started a movement.

No matter how many loopholes were plugged, no matter how many irregularities were exposed, it was plain that the federal government must withdraw that control from the states or else set up machinery for policing it effectively.

This is our intention: to declare war on the evils of demagoguery. The entire community will join in this protest, and we will not relent until there is a change in the voting process and the establishment of democracy.

When nonviolent protests were countered by local authorities with harassment, intimidation, and brutality, the federal government always first asked the Negro to desist and leave the streets rather than bring pressure to bear on those who commit the criminal acts.

I listened attentively to both Mr. Doar and Governor Collins. I said at that point, “I think instead of urging us not to march, you should urge the state troopers not to be brutal toward us if we do march, because we have got to march.”

I say to you this afternoon that I would rather die on the highways of Alabama than make a butchery of my conscience.

I’m asking everybody in the line, if you can’t be nonviolent, don’t get in here. If you can’t accept blows without retaliating, don’t get in the line.

Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man but to win his friendship and understanding.

That will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.

How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

We were reminded that this was not a march to the capital of a civilized nation, as was the March on Washington.

We had marched through a swamp of poverty, ignorance, race hatred, and sadism.

In his address to the joint session of Congress on March 15, 1965, President Johnson made one of the most eloquent, unequivocal, and passionate pleas for human rights ever made by a President of the United States.

But our adversaries met us with such unrestrained brutality that they enlarged the issues to a national scale. The ironic and splendid result of the small Selma project was nothing less than the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In conclusion, Selma brought us a voting bill, and it also brought us the grand alliance of the children of light in this nation and made possible changes in our political and economic life heretofore un-dreamed of.

If the worst in American life lurked in the dark streets of Selma, the best of American democratic instincts arose from across the nation to overcome it.

The economic deprivation, racial isolation, inadequate housing, and general despair of thousands of Negroes teaming in Northern and Western ghettoes are the ready seeds which gave birth to tragic expressions of violence.

By acts of commission and omission none of us in this great country has done enough to remove injustice.

After visiting Watts and talking with hundreds of persons of all walks of life, it was my opinion that the riots grew out of the depths of despair which afflict a people who see no way out of their economic dilemma.

All other advances in education, family life, and the moral climate of the community were dependent upon the ability of the masses of Negroes to earn a living in this wealthy society of ours.

Los Angeles could have expected riots because it is the luminous symbol of luxurious living for whites. Watts is closer to it, and yet farther from it, than any other Negro community in the country.

When people are voiceless, they will have temper tantrums like a little child who has not been paid attention to. And riots are massive temper tantrums from a neglected and voiceless people.

This was more human loss than had been suffered in ten years of nonviolent direct action, which produced the revolutionary social changes in the South.

Violence only serves to harden the resistance of the white reactionary and relieve the white liberal of guilt, which might motivate him to action, and thereby leaves the condition unchanged and embittered.

California in 1964 repealed its law forbidding racial discrimination in housing. It was the first major state in the country to take away gains Negroes had won at a time when progress was visible and substantial elsewhere, and especially in the South.

it remains a fact that “consumption” of goods and services is the raison d’être of the vast majority of Americans. When persons are for some reason or other excluded from the consumer circle, there is discontent and unrest.

Our primary objective was to bring about the unconditional surrender of forces dedicated to the creation and maintenance of slums and ultimately to make slums a moral and financial liability upon the whole community.

In this regard, it was neither I, nor SCLC, that decided to go north, but rather, existing deplorable conditions and the conscience of good to the cause that summoned us.

The slum of Lawndale was truly an island of poverty in the midst of an ocean of plenty.

you realized their overwhelming joy because someone had simply stopped to say hello; for they lived in a world where even their parents were often forced to ignore them.

The “runny noses” of ghetto children became a graphic symbol of medical neglect in a society which had mastered most of the diseases from which they will too soon die.

My neighbors paid more rent in the substandard slums of Lawn-dale than the whites paid for modern apartments in the suburbs.

This exploitation was possible because so many of the residents of the ghetto had no personal means of transportation.

if you received public aid in Chicago, you could not own property, not even an automobile, so you were condemned to the jobs and shops closest to your home.

They were hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare.

We will be sadly mistaken if we think freedom is some lavish dish that the federal government and the white man will pass out on a silver platter while the Negro merely furnishes the appetite.

Freedom is never voluntarily granted by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed.

Swastikas bloomed in Chicago parks like misbegotten weeds.

They failed to realize that the hatred and the hostilities were already latently or subconsciously present. Our marches merely brought them to the surface.

“If you respect my dollar, you must respect my person.” The philosophical undergirding of Operation Breadbasket rested in the belief that many retail business and consumer goods industries depleted the ghetto by selling to Negroes without returning to the community any of the profits through fair hiring practices.

They simply said, “We will no longer spend our money where we cannot get substantial jobs.”

The limited degree of Negro anti-Semitism is substantially a Northern ghetto phenomenon; it virtually does not exist in the South.

He meets them in two dissimilar roles. On the one hand, he is associated with Jews as some of his most committed and generous partners in the civil rights struggle. On the other hand, he meets them daily as some of his most direct exploiters in the ghetto as slum landlords and gouging shopkeepers.

They operate with the ethics of marginal business entrepreneurs, not Jewish ethics, but the distinction is lost on some Negroes who are maltreated by them.

“This is a new day, we don’t sing those words anymore. In fact, the whole song should be discarded. Not ‘We Shall Overcome,’ but ‘We Shall Overrun.’ “ As I listened to all these comments, the words fell on my ears like strange music from a foreign land.

I should have been reminded that disappointment produces despair and despair produces bitterness, and that the one thing certain about bitterness is its blindness.

I asserted, many Mississippi whites, from the government on down, would enjoy nothing more than for us to turn to violence in order to use this as an excuse to wipe out scores of Negroes in and out of the march.

What the SNCC workers saw was the most articulate, powerful, and self-assured young white people coming to work with the poorest of the Negro people — and simply overwhelming them. That summer Stokely and others in SNCC had probably unconsciously concluded that this was no good for Negroes, for it simply increased their sense of their own inadequacies.

So Greenwood turned out to be the arena for the birth of the Black Power slogan in the civil rights movement. The phrase had been used long before by Richard Wright and others, but never until that night had it been used as a slogan in the civil rights movement. For people who had been crushed so long by white power and who had been taught that black was degrading, this slogan had a ready appeal.

I don’t believe in black separatism, I don’t believe in black power that would have racist overtones, but certainly if black power means the amassing of political and economic power in order to gain our just and legitimate goals, then we all believe in that.

I would be misleading you if I made you feel that we could win a violent campaign. It’s impractical even to think about it. The minute we start, we will end up getting many people killed unnecessarily.

Sensing this widening split in our ranks, I asked Stokely and Floyd McKissick to join me in a frank discussion of the problem.

“That is just the point,” I answered. “No one has ever heard the Jews publicly chant a slogan of Jewish power, but they have power.

Through group unity, determination, and creative endeavor, they have gained it. The same thing is true of the Irish and Italians.

But this must come through a program, not merely through a slogan.”

So Black Power is now a part of the nomenclature of the national community. To some it is abhorrent, to others dynamic; to some it is repugnant, to others exhilarating; to some it is destructive, to others it is useful.

First, it is necessary to understand that Black Power is a cry of disappointment.

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.

There is nothing essentially wrong with power. The problem is that in America power is unequally distributed.

This has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience.

Even semantics conspire to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading.

In Roget’s Thesaurus there are some 120 synonyms for “blackness” and at least 60 of them are offensive — such words as “blot,” “soot,” “grime,” “devil,” and “foul.” There are some 134 synonyms for “whiteness,” and all are favorable, expressed in such words as “purity,” “cleanliness,” “chastity,” and “innocence.”

A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is the “black sheep,” not the “white sheep.”

All too many Negroes and whites are unaware of the fact that the first American to shed blood in the revolution which freed this country from British oppression was a black seaman named Crispus Attucks.

History books have virtually overlooked the many Negro scientists and inventors who have enriched American life.

But revolution, though born of despair, cannot long be sustained by despair.

Yet it rejected the one thing that keeps the fire of revolutions burning: the ever-present flame of hope.

The Negro cannot entrust his destiny to a philosophy nourished solely on despair, to a slogan that cannot be implemented into a program.

At best the riots produced a little additional anti-poverty money, allotted by frightened government officials, and a few water sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. Nowhere did the riots win any concrete improvement such as did the organized protest demonstrations.

While I am convinced that the vast majority of Negroes reject violence, even if they did not I would not be interested in being a consensus leader. I refuse to determine what is right by taking a Gallup poll of the trends of the time.

Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

It is simply my way of saying that I would rather be a man of conviction than a man of conformity.

We have a power that can’t be found in Molotov cocktails.

This is why the psychiatrists say, “Love or perish.” Hate is too great a burden to bear.

I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.

Whether right or wrong, I had for too long allowed myself to be a silent onlooker.

They seem to forget that before I was a civil rights leader, I answered a call, and when God speaks, who can but prophesy.

I read the Apostle Paul saying, “Be ye not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of minds.”

as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood.

John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional.

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks the question, “Is it right?” And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.

It took a Birmingham before the government moved to open doors of public accommodations to all human beings. What we now needed was a new kind of Selma or Birmingham to dramatize the economic plight of the Negro, and compel the government to act.

Nonviolent direct action enabled the Negro to take to the streets in active protest, but it muzzled the guns of the oppressor because even he could not shoot down in daylight unarmed men, women, and children. This is the reason there was less loss of life in ten years of Southern protest than in ten days of Northern riots….

The nation waited until the black man was explosive with fury before stirring itself even to partial concern.

When you have mass unemployment in the Negro community, it’s called a social problem; when you have mass unemployment in the white community, it’s called a depression.

And I said to my little children, “I’m going to work and do everything that I can do to see that you get a good education. I don’t ever want you to forget that there are millions of God’s children who will not and cannot get a good education, and I don’t want you feeling that you are better than they are. For you will never be what you ought to be until they are what they ought to be.”

One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage is in the final analysis as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant.

All labor has dignity.

Nothing worthwhile is gained without sacrifice.

We can all get more together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power. Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to affect change, and we need power.

Never forget that freedom is not something that is voluntarily given by the oppressor. It is something that must be demanded by the oppressed.

I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable.

Get somebody to be able to say about you: “He may not have reached the highest height, he may not have realized all of his dreams, but he tried.” Isn’t that a wonderful thing for somebody to say about you?

I don’t know about you, but I can make a testimony. You don’t need to go out saying that Martin Luther King is a saint. Oh, no. I want you to know this morning that I’m a sinner like all of God’s children. But I want to be a good man. And I want to hear a voice saying to me one day, “I take you in and I bless you, because you tried.

The question is not, “If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?” The question is, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?”

Well, I don’t know what will happen now; we’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life — longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

And every now and then I think about my own death, and I think about my own funeral. And I don’t think of it in a morbid sense. Every now and then I ask myself, “What is it that I would want said?” And I leave the word to you this morning. I’d like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others.

Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I wanted to say. If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show somebody he’s traveling wrong, then my living will not be in vain. If I can do my duty as a Christian ought, if I can bring salvation to a world once wrought, if I can spread the message as the master taught, then my living will not be in vain.

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