The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

by Martin Luther King Jr.

As Ralph stood up, unquestioningly, without hesitation, we all linked hands involuntarily, almost as if there had been some divine signal, and twenty-five voices in Room 30 at the Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Alabama, chanted the battle hymn of our movement, “We Shall Overcome.”

I had never been truly in solitary confinement. God’s companionship does not stop at the door of a jail cell. God had been my cellmate.

When the decision came—in Room 30 on Good Friday—that we must commit a faith act, God was there.

And he was also present in a Fifth Avenue, New York City, apartment where a dedicated young star had worked night and day, telephoning everyone he could think of to demand that th...

In the midst of deepest midnight, daybreak had come. I did not know whether the sun was shining at that moment. But I knew th...

Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.

we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.

We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides—and try to understand why he must do so.

If today’s Church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early Church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

Feet planted in the rubble of debris, threatened by criminal violence and hatred, followers of the movement were singing “We Shall Overcome.”

In the summer of 1963 a great shout for freedom reverberated across the land.

It was a shout which brought men of God down out of their pulpits, where they had been preaching only a Sunday kind of love, out into the streets to practice a Monday kind of militancy.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

We must not become bitter; nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. 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.

Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance.

It is a climate where men cannot disagree without being disagreeable,

We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.

If I were constantly worried about death, I could not function. After a while, if your life is more or less constantly in peril, you come to a point where you accept the possibility of death philosophically.

The group of sixty-eight Negroes from Mississippi descended on the convention with a display of power, which even Lyndon Johnson had difficulty coping with.

Their power was the moral power on which this nation was built. They deliberately ignored the man-made rules of the convention and appealed directly to the heart and soul of America and her people.

This is no empty moral admonition. The history of men and of nations has proven that failure to give men the right to vote, to govern themselves and to select their own representatives brings certain chaos to the social, economic, and political institution which allows such an injustice to prevail.

I was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace for 1964.

I had known of my nomination for this honor, but in the rush of responsibilities of a movement such as ours, one does not have time to contemplate honors,

But then I realized that this was no mere recognition of the contribution of one man on the stage of history. It was a testimony to the magnificent drama of the civil rights movement and the thousands of actors who had played their roles extremely well. In truth, it is these “noble” people who had won this Nobel Prize.

it must be said that this Nobel Prize was won by a movement of great people, whose discipline, wise restraint, and majestic courage has led them down a nonviolent course in seeking to establish a reign of justice and a rule of love across this nation of ours:

Members of the ground crew would not win the Nobel Peace Prize. Their names would not go down in history. They were unknown soldiers in the second great American Revolution.

Yet, when years have rolled past and when the blazing light of truth is focused on this marvelous age in which we are now living—men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization—because of the ground crew which made possible the jet flight to the clear skies of brotherhood.

On December 10 in Oslo, I would receive—for the ground crew—a significant symbol, whi...

The Nobel Prize for Peace placed a new dimension in the civil rights struggle. It reminded us graphically that the tide of world opinion was in our favor.

Though people of color are a minority here in America, there are billions of colored people who look to the United States and to her Negro population to demonstrate that color is no obstacle or burden in the modern world.

I pledged that the entire prize of approximately $54,000 would be used to further the movement.

I accept this prize on behalf of all men who love peace and brotherhood. I fought hard to hold back the tears. My emotions were about to overflow.

Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for “the least of these.”

Deeply etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth.

If we feel this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with starvation and ill healt...

the three problems which I considered as the largest of those that confront mankind: racial injustice around the world, poverty, and war. Though each appeared to be separate and isolated, all were interwoven into a single garment of man’s destiny.

the philosophy of nonviolence

this weapon that ennobles the man who wields it.

World peace through nonviolent means is neither absurd nor unattainable. All other methods have failed.

Those of us who believe in this method can be voices of reason, sanity, and understanding amid the voices of violence, hatred, and emotion.

We can very well set a mood of peace out of which a system of...

violence and hate only breed violence and hate,

we must learn that hate is too great a burden to bear

In a real sense, the growth of black nationalism was symptomatic of the deeper unrest, discontent, and frustration of many Negroes because of the continued existence of racial discrimination.

Black nationalism was a way out of that dilemma. It was based on an unrealistic and sectional perspective that I condemned both publicly and privately.

It substituted the tyranny of black supremacy for the tyranny of white supremacy. I always contended that we as a race must not seek to rise from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, but to create a moral balance in society ...