Our nation was formed with the idea that all people were created equal. However, from its inception, there was a glaring contradiction to that principle in the enslavement of African-Americans. We fought a war to bring an end to this contradiction, but even after the war, justice and equality were denied to African-Americans throughout the nation and particularly in the South. For prosperous Americans, it was too easy to ignore this injustice. Thanks be to God that He raised up Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others to compel this nation to pay attention to this injustice and seek to right it. Here are 9 quotes from Dr. King that powerfully describe the conditions African-Americans faced, the method he would use to confront those conditions, and the vision of new conditions that he wanted to bring about.
All of these quotes are taken from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. compiled and edited by Clayborne Carson. I highly recommend it.
The Problem
1. “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'” (3).
2. “A man who lived under the torment of knowledge of the rape of his grandmother and murder of his father under the conditions of the present social order, does not readily accept that social order or seek to integrate into it” (268).
3. “The throbbing pain of segregation could be felt but not seen. It scarred Negroes in every experience of their lives. . . . This Freedom Ride movement came into being to reveal the indiginities and the injustices which Negro people faced as they attempted to do the simple thing of traveling through the South as interstate passengers” (153).
The Method
4. “The way of acquiescence leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But the way of nonviolence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community” (134).
5. “To the ministers I stressed the need for a social gospel to supplement the gospel of individual salvation. I suggested that only a ‘dry as dust’ religion prompts a minister to extol the glories of heaven while ignoring the social conditions that cause men an earthly hell” (179).
6. “My friends, I must say to you that 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” (191).
The Vision
7. “Ultimately, a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these’” (263).
8. “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of George the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood” (226).
9. “I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity equality, and freedom for their spirits” (260).
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