Editorial: In the words of Martin Luther King Jr.
To commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, the editorial board offers these quotes selected from some of his most pivotal and memorable speeches to honor his memory.
“The basic conflict is not really over the buses. Yet we believe that, if the method we use in dealing with equality in the buses can eliminate injustice within ourselves, we shall at the same time be attacking the basis of injustice — man’s hostility to man. This can only be done when we challenge the white community to reexamine its assumptions as we are now prepared to reexamine ours. We do not wish to triumph over the white community. That would only result in transferring those now on the bottom to the top. But, if we can live up to nonviolence in thought and deed, there will emerge an interracial society based on freedom for all.”
— from the article “Our struggle,” published in Liberation, April 1956.
“The dispossessed of this nation — the poor, both white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty. ….If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”
— from the speech “Nonviolence and Social Change,” delivered for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Massey Lectures, December 1967.
“At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. In struggling for human dignity the oppressed people of the world must not allow themselves to become bitter or indulge in hate campaigns. To retaliate with hate and bitterness would do nothing but intensify the hate in the world. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can be done only by projecting the ethics of love to the center of our lives.”
— from the article “Nonviolence and Racial Justice,” published in Christian Century, Feb. 6, 1957.
“[O]ften we have strong tailwinds, and we move through life with ease, and things work in our favor, and everything is bright, and everything is happy. The sunshine of life is glowing radiantly in our eyes. These are bright and marvelous and happy days. But there will come moments when life will present headwinds before you. It seems that as you move something is blocking you. Circumstance after circumstance, disaster after disaster, stand in your path and beat up against you. And who is the man of creativity? He is the man who is determined to move on in spite of the headwinds. … This is what we have to do. We must get within ourselves, cultivate within ourselves, the power of a dynamic will and have the determination to move on amid every circumstance.”
— from the sermon “Unfulfilled Hopes,” delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, on April 5, 1959.
“They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death.. ….They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.”
— from “Eulogy for the Martyred Children,” delivered at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama, on Sept. 18, 1963.
