Martin Luther King Jr Quotes
411 Martin Luther King Jr Quotes
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Every parent at some time faces the problem of explaining the facts of life to his child.
Martin Luther King Jr
The very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.
Martin Luther King Jr
No one doubts the valor and commitment that characterized George Washington’s life. But to the end of his days he maintained a posture of exclusionism toward the slave. He was a fourth-generation slaveholder. He only allowed Negroes to enter the Continental Army because His Majesty’s Crown was attempting to recruit Negroes to the British cause.
Martin Luther King Jr
Many poor whites… were the derivative victims of slavery. As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth.
Martin Luther King Jr
It is because the Negro knows that no person – as well as no nation – can truly exist half slave and half free that he has embroidered upon his banners the significant word NOW.
Martin Luther King Jr
Abraham did not ask, ‘What will happen to me if I issue the Emancipation Proclamation and bring an end to chattel slavery?’ but he asked, ‘What will happen to the Union and to millions of Negro people, if I fail to do it?’
Martin Luther King Jr
The Emancipation Proclamation [of 1863] did not, however bring full freedom to the Negro, for although he enjoyed certain political and social opportunities during the Reconstruction, the Negro soon discovered that the pharaohs of the South were determined to keep him in slavery.
Martin Luther King Jr
Four million newly liberated slaves found themselves with no bread to eat, no land to cultivate, no shelter to cover their heads… In 1863 the Negro was given abstract freedom expressed in luminous rhetoric. But in an agrarian economy he was given no land to make liberation concrete.
Martin Luther King Jr
Abused and scorned though we [the blacks] may be, our destiny is tied with America’s destiny. Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here.
Martin Luther King Jr
Arnold Toynbee says in A Study of History that it may be the Negro who will give the new spiritual dynamic to Western civilization that it so desperately needs to survive. I hope this is possible. The spiritual power that the Negro can radiate to the world comes from love, understanding, good will, and nonviolence.
Martin Luther King Jr
Many white men fear retaliation. The job of the Negro is to show them that they have nothing to fear, that the Negro understands and forgives and is ready to forget the past.
Martin Luther King Jr
There are those who are sufficiently soft-minded to believe in the superiority of the white race and the inferiority of the Negro in spite of the touch-minded research of anthropologists who reveal the falsity of such a notion.
Martin Luther King Jr
This decision [the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling of 1954] is a great beacon-light of hope to millions of disinherited people. Looking back, we see the forces of segregation gradually dying on the seashore… At least we have left Egypt, and with patient yet firm determination we shall reach the promised land.
Martin Luther King Jr
Today we are witnessing massive change. A world-shaking decree by the nine justices of the United States Supreme Court [of 1954] opened the Red Sea and the forces of justice are moving to the other side. The Court affirmed that separate facilities are inherently unequal…
Martin Luther King Jr
Another letter cursed the Supreme Court and threatened ‘that damned Hugo Black: When he comes to Alabama we’re going to hang you and him from the same tree.’
Martin Luther King Jr
With a mixture of anxiety and hope, I read these words: ‘The United States Supreme Court today affirmed a decision of a …. District Court in declaring Alabama’s state and local laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional.’ … At this moment my heart began to throb with an inexpressible joy. The darkest hour of our struggle had indeed proved to be the hour of victory.
Martin Luther King Jr
But the courts are no longer so certain of their role. They remember too well what happened to their rulings on bus segregation… They fear that the high Court could also knock out other forms of segregation in public facilities.
Martin Luther King Jr
When the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation was handed down, leading segregationists vowed to thwart it by invoking ‘a century of litigation’… The injunction method has now become the leading instrument of the South to block the direct-action civil-rights drive… The Alabama courts are notorious for ‘sitting on’ cases of this nature.. When the injunction was issued in Birmingham, our failure to obey bewildered our opponents… I intended to be on of the first to see the example of civil disobedience.
Martin Luther King Jr
It was be a mistake to minimize the impact upon the South of the federal court orders and legislative and executive acts already in effect. Federal court decrees have altered transportation patterns, teachers’ salaries, the use of recreational facilities, and myriad of other matters.
Martin Luther King Jr
The unions forming the AFL-CIO include 1.3 million Negroes among their 13.5 million members. Only the combined religious institutions serving the Negro community can claim a greater membership of Negroes. The Negro then has a right to expect the resources of the American trade union movement to be used in assuring him – like all the rest of its members – of a proper place in American society.
Martin Luther King Jr
In unhappy contrast, the National Council of the AFL-CIO declined to support the March [on Washington, August 1963] and adopted a position of neutrality. A number of international unions, however, independently declared their support…
Martin Luther King Jr
It is interesting to note that some of the states that today are opposing progress in civil rights were the same that defied the union’s efforts during the thirties.
Martin Luther King Jr
Negroes battling for their own recognition today have a right to expect more from their old allies. Nothing would hold back the forces of progress in American life more effectively than a schism between the Negro and organized labor.
Martin Luther King Jr
To play our role fully as Negroes we will have to strive for enhanced representation and influence in the labor movement. Our young people need to think of union careers as earnestly as they do of business careers and professions.
Martin Luther King Jr
We are now [1966] able to see why the Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, which we described at the time as historic, has not made history. After twelve years, barely 12 percent school desegregation existed in the whole South, and in the Deep South the figure hardly reached 2 percent. And even these few schools were in many cases integrated only with a handful of Negroes.
Martin Luther King Jr
In elementary schools Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than do the white schools.
Martin Luther King Jr
Crises arising in Northern schools are interpreted as proofs that Negroes are inherently delinquent. The extremists do not recognize that these school problems are symptoms of urban dislocation, rather than expressions of racial deficiency.
Martin Luther King Jr
The schools of the South are the present storm center. Here the forces that stand for the best in our national life have been tragically ineffectual… the forces of goodwill failed to come through. The Office of the President was appallingly silent… Other forces of justice also failed to act.
Martin Luther King Jr
Truth crushed to the earth would rise again.
Martin Luther King Jr
For a long time, I encouraged my wife to be active in the peace movement. Finally I could no longer stand silently by. I have spoken my convictions that this is the most evil and unjust war in the history of our country.
Martin Luther King Jr
I know I’m right. I know this is an unjust and evil war. I have made my decision to oppose it, and whatever people say, I am going to stick to my convictions.
Martin Luther King Jr
You have everything I have ever wanted in a wife. There are only four things, and you have them all… The four things that I look for in a wife are character, intelligence, personality and beauty. And you have them all. I want to see you again. When can I?
Martin Luther King Jr
I don’t mind. Somebody has to do it, and if you think I can, I will serve.
Martin Luther King Jr
The time has come when I should no longer accept bail. If I commit a crime in the name of civil rights, I will go to jail and serve the time.
Martin Luther King Jr
When all God’s children, black men and white man, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing – Free at last!
Martin Luther King Jr
[On learning that President John F Kennedy] had been shot he turned to Coretta and said] This is what is going to happen to me also.
Martin Luther King Jr
[On Coretta saying ‘I believe in you, if that means anything’] Yes, it means a great deal.
Martin Luther King Jr
If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral.
Martin Luther King Jr
[On Coretta hanging up a large portrait of the Nobel Laurette in the hallway] You’re not supposed to memorialize people while they’re still living. [Momentarily removed, was returned to the same place the following week.]
Martin Luther King Jr
Education should equip us with the power to think effectively and objectively. … Education should cause us to rise beyond the horizon of legions of half truth, prejudices and propaganda. Education should enable us to ‘weigh and consider,’ to discern the truth from the false, the relevant from the irrelevant, and the real from the unreal.
Martin Luther King Jr
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