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Martin Luther King Jr.

One of the main leaders of the American civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. organized and led marches for blacks' right to vote, desegregation, labor rights and other basic civil rights. A Baptist minister by training, King became an activist early in his career, leading the Montgomery Bus Boycott and helping to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Taking inspiration from Mahatma Gandhi, King utilized nonviolent civil disobedience to raise consciousness. Between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, providing what he called a coalition of conscience and inspiring his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, a manifesto of the black revolution. He planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of African-Americans as voters and his monumental 1963 March on Washington, DC in which Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, electrifying the crowd.

This speech is regarded, along with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, as one of the finest speeches in the history of American oratory.  King conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963, and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure. In 1964, King became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end segregation and racial discrimination through civil disobedience and other non-violent means. On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. Martin Luther King Day was established as a national holiday in the United States in 1986. In 2004, King was posthumously awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.

“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”

“All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.”

“If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”

“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically... Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.”

            

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

“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 believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.”

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

“We will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

“Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam.
I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.
I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam.
I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.”

“We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.”

- Martin Luther King Jr.  (1929-1968)

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