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July 19 - September 28, 2020
King continued to urge the African American community to refuse to let the path toward black affirmation lead into the self-defeating way of isolation and
“Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humanness.”
“Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the hands of the white community.”
A year later, some of the Negro leaders who had been present in Selma and at the Capitol ceremonies no longer held office in their organizations. They had been discarded to symbolize a radical change of tactics. A year later, the white backlash had become an emotional electoral issue in California, Maryland and elsewhere. In several Southern states men long regarded as political clowns had become governors or only narrowly missed election, their magic achieved with a “witches’” brew of bigotry, prejudice, half-truths and whole lies.
Moreover, the white backlash had always existed underneath and sometimes on the surface of American life.
It appeared that the white segregationist and the ordinary white citizen had more in common with one another than either had with the Negro.
The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro.
A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared.
The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.
Cries of Black Power and riots are not
the causes of white resistance, they are consequences
We are encountering just such an experience today. The inevitable counterrevolution that succeeds every period of progress is taking place.
A final victory is an accumulation of many short-term encounters.
No great victories are won in a war for the transformation of a whole people without total participation.
Yet the average white person also has a responsibility. He has to resist the impulse to
seize upon the rioter as the exclusive villain.
I guess I should not have been surprised. I should have known that in an atmosphere where false promises are daily realities, where deferred dreams are nightly facts, where acts of unpunished violence toward Negroes are a way of life, nonviolence would
eventually be seriously questioned.
should have been reminded that disappointment produces despair and despair produces bitterness, and that the one thing certain about bitterness is its blindness. Bitterness has not the capacity to make the distinction between some and all. When some members of the dominant group, particularly those in...
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Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose.
Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.
The tendency to ignore the Negro’s contribution to American life and strip him of his personhood is as old as the earliest history books and as contemporary as the morning’s newspaper.
revolution, though born of despair, cannot long be sustained by despair.
An excess of skepticism, however, becomes a fetter.
Some, seeking to reject their heritage, are ashamed of their color, ashamed of black art and music, and determine what is beautiful and good by the standards of white society.
My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us.
church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority. A religion true to its mission knows that segregation is morally wrong and sinful.
Our government must depend more on its moral power than on its military power.
Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humaneness.
Education without social action is a one-sided value
I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.
