The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

by Martin Luther King Jr.

Greenwood turned out to be the arena for the birth of the Black Power slogan in the civil rights movement.

I don’t believe in black separatism, I don’t believe in black power that would have racist overtones, but certainly if black power means the amassing of political and economic power in order to gain our just and legitimate goals, then we all believe in that. And I think that all white people of goodwill believe in that.

Each word, I said, has a denotative meaning—its explicit and recognized sense—and a connotative meaning—its suggestive sense.

Today, young men of America are fighting, dying, and killing in Asian jungles in a war whose purposes are so ambiguous the whole nation seethes with dissent. They are told they are sacrificing for democracy, but the Saigon regime, their ally, is a mockery of democracy and the black American soldier has himself never experienced democracy.

I

am firmly committed to the creative power of nonviolence as the force which is capable of winning lasting and meaningful brotherhood and peace.

one night I picked up an article entitled “The Children of Vietnam,” and I read it. And after reading that article, I said to myself, “Never again will I be silent on an issue that is destroying the soul of our nation and destroying thousands and thousands of little children in Vietnam.” I came to the conclusion that there is an existential moment in your life when you must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.

John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood….

there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.

It is not something that you merely put your hands on. It is not something that you wear. The cross is something that you bear and ultimately that you die on.

And injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

There was a literal depression in the Negro community. When you have mass unemployment in the Negro community, it’s called a social problem; when you have mass unemployment in the white community, it’s called a depression.