The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

by Martin Luther King Jr.

I made the decision to lead the march on Sunday and was prepared to do so in spite of any possible danger to my person.

It was arranged that I take a chartered plane to Montgomery after the morning service and lead the march out of Selma, speak with a group for three or four hours, and take a chartered flight back in order to be on hand for the Sunday Communion Service at 7:30 P.M.

was prepared to go to jail on Monday but at the same time I would have met my church responsibilities.

I shall never forget my agony of conscience for not being there when I heard of the dastardly acts perpetrated against nonviolent demonstrators that Sunday, March 7.

Let us march on segregated schools until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past and Negroes and whites study side by side

Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat. March on poverty until no starved man walks the streets of our cities

For all of us today the battle is in our hands.

I must admit to you there are still jail cells waiting for us, dark and difficult moments. We will go on with the faith that nonviolence and its power transformed dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. We will be able to change all of these conditions.

Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man but to win his friendship and understanding. We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.

That will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be...

As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, housemaids and shop workers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in that moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood.

Before long, more than a million Negroes will be new voters—and psychologically, new people.

By acts of commission and omission none of us in this great country has done enough to remove injustice.

When people are voiceless, they will have temper tantrums like a little child who has not been paid attention to. And riots are massive temper tantrums from a neglected and voiceless people.

Violence only serves to harden the resistance of the white reactionary and relieve the white liberal of guilt, which might motivate him to action, and thereby leaves the condition unchanged and embittered.

Essentially it meant removing future generations from dilapidated tenements, opening the doors of job opportunities to all regardless of their color, and making the resources of all social institutions available for their uplifting into the mainstream of American life.

they lived in a world where even their parents were often forced to ignore them.

In the tight squeeze of economic pressure, their mothers and fathers both had to work; indeed, more often than not, the father will hold two jobs, one in the day and another at night.

With the long distances ghetto parents had to travel to work and the emotional exhaustion that comes from the daily struggle to survive in a hostile world, they were left with too little time or energy to ...

you were reminded that vitamin pills and flu shots were luxuries which they could ill afford.

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

The situation was much the same for consumer goods, purchase prices of homes, and a variety of other services.

This exploitation was possible because so many of the residents of the ghetto had no person...

It was a vicious circle. You could not get a job because you were poorly educated, and you had to depend on...

but if you received public aid in Chicago, you could not own property, not even an automobile, so you were condemned to the j...

Once confined to this isolated community, one no longer participated in a free economy, but was subject to price fixing and wholesale robber...

It is a psychological axiom that frustration generates aggression. Certainly, the Northern ghetto daily victimized its inhabitants.

Our own children lived with us in Lawndale, and it was only a few days before we became aware of the change in their behavior. Their tempers flared, and they sometimes reverted to almost infantile behavior.

To the young victim of the slums, this society has so limited the alternatives of his life that the expression of his manhood is reduced to the ability to defend himself physically.

We were paying $94 for four run-down, shabby rooms, and we would go out on our open housing marches on Gage Park and other places

and we discovered that whites with five sanitary, nice, new rooms, apartments with five rooms, were paying only $78 a month.

They learned

the beautiful lesson of acting against evil by renouncing force.

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 power, are racist in attitude and practice, bitterness accuses the whole group.

If they lowered the banner of nonviolence, I said, Mississippi injustice would not be exposed and the moral issues would be obscured.

For years the Negro had been taught that he was nobody, that his color was a sign of his biological depravity, that his being was stamped with an indelible imprint of inferiority, that his whole history was soiled with the filth of worthlessness.

All too few people realize how slavery and racial segregation scarred the soul and wounded the spirit of the black man. The whole dirty business of slavery was based on the premise that the Negro was a thing to be used, not a person to be respected.

Black Power assumed that Negroes would be slaves unless there was a new power to counter the force of the men who are still determine...

In Roget’s Thesaurus there are some 120 synonyms for “blackness” and at least 60 of them are offensive—such words as “blot,” “soot,” “grime,” “devil,” and “foul.”

The history books, which had almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, only served to intensify the Negroes’ sense of worthlessness and to augment the anachronistic doctrine of white supremacy.

All too many Negroes and whites are unaware of the fact that the first American to shed blood in the revolution which freed this country from British oppression was a black seaman named Crispus Attucks.

Negroes and whites are almost totally oblivious of the fact that it was a Negro physician, Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, who performed the first succ...

Nonviolence is power, but it is the right and good use of power. Constructively it can save the white man as well as the Negro.

Only through our adherence to nonviolence—which also means love in its strong and commanding sense—will the fear in the white community be mitigated.

Ultimately, a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

If every Negro in the United States turns to violence, I will choose to be that one lone voice preaching that this is the wrong way.

I would rather be a man of conviction than a man of conformity.

Our oppressors have used hatred. Our oppressors have used rifles and guns. I’m not going to stoop down to their level. I want to rise to a higher level. We have a power that can’t be found in Molotov cocktails.

It will be power infused with love and justice, that will change dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows, and lift us from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. A dark, desperate, confused, and sin-sick world waits for this new kind of man and this new kind of power.