But they ask-and rightly so-what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted." - Beyond Vietnam: A Time To Break Silence speech, New York, New York on April 4, 1967.Ĭivil rights leader Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr delivers a speech to a crowd of approximately 7,000 people on at UC Berkeley's Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, California. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. "As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. Be careful, 'brethren!' Be careful, teachers!" - The Purpose of Education from Morehouse College student newspaper, The Maroon Tiger, 1947. "If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. This was his last speech before being shot dead the following day. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land." - I've Been to The Mountaintop speech, April 3, 1968. I've looked over and I've seen the promised land. But it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been to the mountaintop. "With patient and firm determination we will press on until every valley of despair is exalted to new peaks of hope, until every mountain of pride and irrationality is made low by the leveling process of humility and compassion until the rough places of injustice are transformed into a smooth plane of equality of opportunity and until the crooked places of prejudice are transformed by the straightening process of bright-eyed wisdom." -Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech. Be the best of whatever you are." -Speech before a group of students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia, October 26, 1967. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. The rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population." - Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967. When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. Thus, half of all Negroes live in substandard housing, and Negroes have half the income of whites. Of the good things in life he has approximately one-half those of whites of the bad he has twice those of whites. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person. "When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person. On Voting Rights, Joe Biden Takes His Biggest Gamble Yet.Martin Luther King Jr.'s Daughter Says Racism, Not CRT, a Problem in U.S.MLK's Daughter Pays Tribute to Malcolm X's Daughter Malikah Shabazz.Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." - Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
MLK QUOTES ABOUT CHANGE SERIES
To commemorate the day, Newsweek has compiled a series of King Jr's greatest quotes. Recurring police brutality and the growth of movements such as Black Lives Matter have brought racial tensions across the country to a near breaking point.Īs a result, today's Martin Luther King Jr Day bears a greater cultural and societal weight. However, in recent years, many of the systematic racial abuses that Martin Luther King Jr dedicated his life to peacefully combatting have once again bubbled to the surface. His commitment to racial equality and ending segregation was pivotal in the weaving of a new social fibre across the nation. throughout the 1950s and 60s, the ripples of which are still being felt to this day. The Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr sparked a wave of progress that swept the U.S.