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June 29, 2020 - January 22, 2021
“Evil is not driven out, but crowded out,”
fingerprinted, and incarcerated Rosa Parks. It was not possible for her to think lightly of being arrested. Having crossed the line that in polite society divided Negroes from niggers, she had reason to expect not only stinging disgrace among her own people but the least civilized attentions of the whites. When she was allowed to call home, her mother’s first response was to groan and ask, “Did they beat you?”
there comes a time,” he cried, “when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.”
we are not here advocating violence,” he said. “We have overcome that.”
“The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.”
“And we are determined here in Montgomery—to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream!”
“Love is one of the pinnacle parts of the Christian faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which would work against love.” He
power of communion emerged from him that would speak inexorably to strangers who would both love and revile him, like all prophets. He was twenty-six, and had not quite twelve years and four months to live.
he was especially sorry to see ministers of the gospel leading a political campaign.
“My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”
Pollard looked right through a smiling but flustered King. Before he could say anything, she moved her face close to his and said loudly, “I done told you we is with you all the way. But even if we ain’t with you, God’s gonna take care of you.” With that, Mother Pollard inched her way back toward her seat, as the crowd roared and King’s eyes filled with tears. Later, King said that with her consoling words fearlessness had come over him in the form of raw energy.
(4) Our church is becoming militant, stressing a social gospel as well as a gospel of personal salvation;
oratory could aspire only to enlightenment, and that enlightenment was not enough. Power was required.
“I thought of many things,” he said. “When I stood there in Westminster Abbey, with all of its beauty, I thought about all of the beautiful hymns and anthems that the people would go into there to sing, yet the Church of England never took a stand against this system. The Church of England sanctioned it. The Church of England gave it a moral stature. And all of the exploitation
perpetuated by the British Empire was sanctioned by the Church of England. Something else came to my mind. God comes into the picture even when the Church won’t take a stand. God…has said that all men must reflect the dignity and worth of all human personality…. Seems this morning that I can hear God speaking.”
“Then I can hear Isaiah again,” he said, “because it has a profound meaning to me. That somehow ‘every valley shall be exalted, every hill shall be made low, the crooked places shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.’ And that’s the beauty of this thing. All flesh shall see it together. Not some from the heights of Park Street* and others from the dungeons of slum areas. Not some from the pinnacles of the British Empire and some from the dark deserts of Africa. Not some from inordinate, superfluous wealth
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if Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.”
“If you are digging a ditch with a teaspoon and a man comes along and offers you a spade,” he said, “there is something wrong with your head if you don’t take it because he didn’t offer you a bulldozer.”
King himself was surer of what they should think than what they should do.
Knowing what to think is always easier than knowing what to do. I know that I should think systemic racism is real and that Police Brutality needs to stop, but it's more difficult to know what to do about it.
Graham’s Negro staff members published an article titled “No Color Line in Heaven,” in which he compiled Graham’s views opposing segregationist dogma.
I would like to find this article
Some years later, King confided to a colleague that he not only had known of Abernathy’s extramarital liaisons in Montgomery but had joined in some of them himself. This confession, if true, dated King’s own infidelities back to his tenure in Montgomery, and thus the Davis scandal must have touched some of the deepest secrets and most piercing fears in his own life.
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so India may have to take the lead and call for universal disarmament, and if no other nation will join her immediately, India should declare itself for disarmament unilaterally.”
“Most of us have an amazing capacity for external criticism,” King
young boy of eighteen who was introduced as John Lewis.
“Paul’s Letter to the American Christians,” in which King assumed the style and theology of St. Paul to criticize Christians for selfishness and failures of brotherhood. Lewis
He said he disapproved of farm work because it was like gambling with nature. The parents at first considered this a bizarre excuse for laziness, but when they learned the intensity of his will they could only wish that laziness was the cause. Young Lewis lived in a world of his own. He had no feeling whatsoever for hogs, dogs, or most farm animals, but endless hours of study convinced him that chickens were worthy of adoption as the world’s innocent creatures. Whenever a chicken was killed for dinner, Lewis cried hysterically and boycotted meals. He refused for days to speak to anyone in his
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Besides, the people he needed to lead already understood him,
“Wherever M. L. King, Jr., has been there has followed in his wake a wave of crimes including stabbing, bombings, and inciting of riots, barratry, destruction of property and many others,”
No one had time to wonder why the Greensboro sit-in was so different. In the previous three years, similar demonstrations had occurred in at least sixteen other cities. Few of them made the news, all faded quickly from public notice, and none had the slightest catalytic effect anywhere else. By contrast,
“The underlying philosophies of segregation are diametrically opposed to democracy and Christianity,
“Fill up the jails”
“Sullivan’s problem is not a photographer with a camera,” he wrote. “Sullivan’s problem is a white man with a baseball bat.”
Billy Graham supported his church ambitions by hosting a banquet in King’s honor.
America is the hope of the world.”
Durr had gone berserk in the
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the 1957 Civil Rights
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“The thing that disappoints me about the Southern white church is that it spends all of its time dealing with Jesus after the cross, instead of dealing with Jesus before the cross,”
“You didn’t do a thing but preach about the death of Jesus,” he said. “If that were the heart of Christianity, all God had to do was to drop him down on Friday, and let them kill him, and then yank him up again on Easter Sunday. That’s all you hear. You don’t hear so much about his three years of teaching that man’s religion is revealed in the love of his fellow man. He who says he loves God and hates his fellow man is a liar, and the truth is not in him. That is what offended the leaders of Jesus’s own established church as well as the colonial authorities from Rome. That’s why they put him
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“But Jesus is not crazy. We are crazy. The church has not formally denounced the Sermon on the Mount. It has merely let it slide. I want to deal with Jesus before the cross. I don’t give a damn what happened to him after the cross.”
storm—“I know there is a God, and I know he hates injustice”—then
pragmatism—“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich”—and
Rev. John Rutland, Bull Connor’s Methodist pastor, was down at city hall that morning, pleading with Connor not to let them beat up the kids on the buses.
it’s more important that these people in the church survive physically than for us to survive politically,”
“It’s not your responsibility before God or under the law to tell us how to honor our constitutional rights. It’s your job to protect us when we do.”
“Come get my mattress!” he cried. “I’ll keep my soul!”
In miniature, the Freedom Riders were compressing into one summer the psychology of the first three centuries of Christianity under the Roman Empire. Perpetually on the brink of schism, apostles of nonviolent love were fanning out into the provinces to fill jails, while their confederates were negotiating with the emperors themselves for full citizenship rights, hoping to establish their outlandish new faith as the official doctrine of the state.
The spirit of the songs could sweep up the crowd, and the young leaders realized that through song they could induce humble people to say and feel things that otherwise were beyond them.
We pray, oh Lord That oppression will end That domination will end That prejudice will cease. Thou who Overruled the Pharaohs Overruled the Babylonians Overruled the Greeks and Romans You alone is God Always have been God God in man God in love. May our suffering help us. For the Lord is my shepherd I shall not want He maketh me to lie down…
‘We will win you with the power of our capacity to endure,’”
“capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.”
