Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (King Legacy Book 2)

by Martin Luther King Jr.

Jefferson’s majestic words, “all men are created equal,” meant for him, as for many others, that all white men are created equal. Yet in his heart Jefferson knew that slavery was wrong and that it degraded the white man’s mind and soul. In the same Notes on Virginia he wrote: “For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labor for another…. Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever … the Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.” And in 1820, six years before his death, he wrote these melancholy words: “But the momentous question [slavery] like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union…. I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passion of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be that I live not to weep over it.”