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January 29 - February 15, 2021
“If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie.”
experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: “Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.” Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.
the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who, in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.
who walked to work and home again as much as twelve miles a day for over a year rather than submit to the discourtesies and humiliation of segregated buses.
“Keep Martin Luther King in the background and God in the foreground and everything will be all right. Remember you are a channel of the gospel and not the source.”
rationally inexplicable and morally unjustifiable.
she visited the Negro section of town where we would be living without choice.
This low figure was in part the result of the Negroes’ own lack of interest or persistence in surmounting the barriers erected against them;
The registrars servicing Negro lines move at a noticeably leisurely pace, so that of fifty Negroes in line, as few as fifteen
This question betrayed an assumption that there was only one approach to the solution of the race problem.
Through education we seek to change attitudes; through legislation and court orders we seek to regulate behavior.
Anyone who starts out with the conviction that the road to racial justice is only one lane wide will inevitably create a traffic jam and make the journey infinitely longer.
indifference expressed itself in a lack of participation in any move toward better racial conditions, and a sort
educated group were employed in vulnerable positions, and a forthright stand in the area of racial justice might result in the loss of a job.
This, however, was not the whole story. Too much of the inaction was due to sheer apathy.
But a religion true to its nature must also be concerned about man’s social conditions. Religion deals with both earth and heaven, both time and eternity. Religion operates not only on the vertical plane but also on the horizontal. It seeks not only to integrate men with God
but to integrate men with men and each man with himself. This means, at bottom, that the Christian gospel is a two-way road. On the one hand it seeks to change the souls of men, and thereby unite them with God; on the other hand it seeks to change the environmental conditions of men so that the soul will have a chance after it is changed. Any religion that professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the
social conditions that cripple them is a dry-as-dust religion. Such a religion is the kind the Marxists like ...
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It scars the soul and degrades the personality.
“You are less than …” “You are not equal to …” The system of segregation itself was responsible for much of the passivity of the Negroes of Montgomery.
One of his basic theses was that any individual who submitted willingly to injustice did not really deserve more justice.
True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.
tired people who had come to see that it is ultimately more honorable to walk the streets in dignity than to ride the buses in humiliation.
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.
a speech that was expected to give a sense of direction to a people imbued with a new and still unplumbed passion for justice.
I was now almost overcome, obsessed by a feeling of inadequacy. In this state of anxiety, I had already wasted five minutes of the original twenty. With nothing left but faith in a power whose matchless strength stands over against the frailties and inadequacies of human nature, I turned to God in prayer. My words were brief and simple, asking God to restore my balance and to be with me in a time when I needed His guidance more than ever.
I decided that I had to face the challenge head on, and attempt to combine two apparent irreconcilables. I would seek to arouse the group to action by insisting that their self-respect was at stake and that if they accepted such injustices without protesting, they would betray their own sense of dignity and the eternal edicts of God Himself. But I would balance this with a strong affirmation of the Christian doctrine of love.
But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.”
“our actions must be guided by the deepest principles of our Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal. Once again we must hear the words of Jesus echoing across the centuries: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.’
“If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.”
While I would not let this experience tempt me to overlook the need for continued preparation, it would always remind me that God can transform man’s weakness into his glorious opportunity.
The main substance of the resolution called upon the Negroes not to resume riding the buses until (1) courteous treatment by the bus operators was guaranteed; (2) passengers were seated on a first-come, first-served basis—Negroes seating from the back of the bus toward the front while whites seated from the front toward the back; (3) Negro bus operators were employed on predominantly Negro routes.
The real victory was in the mass meeting, where thousands of black people stood revealed with a new sense of dignity and destiny.
But there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by oppression. There comes a time when people get tired of being plunged into the abyss of exploitation and nagging injustice.
willing to substitute tired feet for tired souls, and walk the streets of Montgomery until the walls of segregation were finally battered by the forces of justice.
It is one of the splendid ironies of our day that Montgomery, the Cradle of the Confederacy, is being transformed into Montgomery, the cradle of freedom and justice.
The biggest job in getting any movement off the ground is to keep together the people who form it.
it demands a philosophy that wins and holds the people’s allegiance; and it depends upon open channels of communication between the people and their leaders. All of these elements were present in Montgomery.
It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love.
Nonviolent resistance had emerged as the technique of the movement, while love stood as the regulating ideal.
In other words, Christ furnished the spirit and motivation, while Gandhi furnished the method.
Thus the mass meetings accomplished on Monday and Thursday nights what the Christian Church had failed to accomplish on Sunday mornings.
Men and women who had been separated from each other by false standards of class were now singing and praying together in a common struggle for freedom and human dignity.
To meet hate with retaliatory hate would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe.
Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul force. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.
inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.
Christian I believe that there is a creative personal power in this universe who is the ground and essence of all reality—a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms.
The Christian ought always to be challenged by any protest against unfair treatment of the poor, for Christianity is itself such a protest, nowhere expressed more eloquently than in Jesus’s words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”
capitalism is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life.
Historically capitalism failed to see the truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise.
