The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

by Martin Luther King Jr.

He is a man of real integrity, deeply committed to moral and ethical principles.

As far back as I can remember I was in church every Sunday. My best friends were in Sunday school, and it was the Sunday school that helped me to build the capacity for getting along with people.

I feel that preaching is one of the most vital needs of our society, if it is used correctly. There is a great paradox in preaching: on the one hand it may be very helpful and on the other it may be very pernicious. It is my opinion that sincerity is not enough for the preaching ministry. The minister must be both sincere and intelligent…. I

She saw the greatness of the movement and had a unique willingness to sacrifice herself for its continuation. If I have done anything in this struggle, it is because I have had behind me and at my side a devoted, understanding, dedicated, patient companion in the person of my wife.

You see, equality is not only a matter of mathematics and geometry, but it’s a matter of psychology. It’s not only a quantitative something but it is a qualitative something; and it is possible to have quantitative equality and qualitative inequality. The doctrine of separate but equal can never be.

It says to us first that the oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed. You have to work for it. Freedom is never given to anybody. Privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong resistance.

I decided that I would take one day a week as a day of silence and meditation. This I attempted on several occasions, but things began to pile up so much that I found myself using that particular day as a time to catch up on so many things that had accumulated. I knew that I could not continue to live with such a tension-filled schedule. My whole life seemed to be centered around giving something out and only rarely taking something in. My failure to reflect would do harm not only to me as a person, but to the total movement. For that reason I felt a moral obligation to do it.

The mistake I made there was to protest against segregation generally rather than against a single and distinct facet of it. Our protest was so vague that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair. It would have been much better to have concentrated upon integrating the buses or the lunch counters.

Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

We must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and worth of all human personality.

Let us march on segregated housing until every ghetto of social and economic depression dissolves and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing.

All other advances in education, family life, and the moral climate of the community were dependent upon the ability of the masses of Negroes to earn a living in this wealthy society of ours.

Our main concentration would be on the school issue—a fight for quality integrated education which had been waged in that city for more than five years. This did not mean that we would stop there, because it was painfully clear that the school issue was merely symptomatic of a system which relegated thousands of Negroes into economic and spiritual deprivation.

The “runny noses” of ghetto children became a graphic symbol of medical neglect in a society which had mastered most of the diseases from which they will too soon die. There was something wrong in a society which allowed this to happen.

My neighbors paid more rent in the substandard slums of Lawn-dale than the whites paid for modern apartments in the suburbs.

America’s horror was only expressed when the aggression turned outward, when the ghetto and its controls could no longer contain its destructiveness. In many a week as many Negro youngsters were killed in gang fights as were killed in the riots. Yet there was no citywide expression of horror.

Riots grow out of intolerable conditions. Violent revolts are generated by revolting conditions and there is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people who feel they have no stake in it, who feel they have nothing to lose.

We must condemn those who are perpetuating the violence, and not those individuals who engage in the pursuit of their constitutional rights.