The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

by Martin Luther King Jr.

Had I not committed myself to the principle that looking away from evil is, in effect, a condoning of it? Those who lynch, pull the trigger, point the cattle prod, or open the fire hoses act in the name of the silent.

The great tragedy was that our government declared a war against poverty, and yet it only financed a skirmish against poverty. And this led to great despair.

It led to great cynicism and discontent throughout the Negro community.

I had lived in the ghettos of Chicago and Cleveland, and I knew the hurt and the cynicism and the discontent. And the fact was that every city in our cou...

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.

I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war.

Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative?

Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so f...

What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or...

I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God.

Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood.

Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children,...

We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation, for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers….

This need to maintain social stability for our investment accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala.

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

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a th...

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and...

The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional.

Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies….

We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing wor...

If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might w...

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?”

And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks the question, “Is it right?”

I do not believe our nation can be a moral leader of justice, equality, and democracy if it is trapped in the role of a self-appointed world policeman.

Throughout my career in the civil rights movement I have been concerned about justice for all people. For instance, I strongly feel that we must end not merely poverty among Negroes but poverty among white people.

Likewise, I have always insisted on justice for all the world over, because justice is indivisible. And injustice anywhere...

I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be thirty-eight years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause.

And you refuse to do it because you are afraid. You refuse to do it because y...

You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will...

So you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at thirt...

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when...

You died when you refused to stand up for truth. You died when you refused to...

Don’t ever think that you’re by yourself. Go on to jail if necessary, but you never go alone. Take a stand for that which is right, and the world ...

But you never go alone, for somewhere I read that one with God is a majority. And God has a way of transform...

Walk with Him this morning and believe in Him and do what is right, and He’ll be with you even until ...

Yes, I’ve seen the lightning flash. I’ve heard t...

I’ve felt sin breakers dashing, trying to conquer my soul, but I heard the voice of Jesus saying, still to fight on. He promised never to l...

No, never alone. No, ne...

From sermon at Ebenezer, Nove...

It’s because we have taken on to ourselves a kind of arrogance of power. We’ve ignored the mandates of justice and morality.

Nonviolent direct action enabled the Negro to take to the streets in active protest, but it muzzled the guns of the oppressor because even he could not shoot down in daylight unarmed men, women, and children.

This is the reason there was less loss of life in ten years of Southern protest than in ten days of Northern riots….

we are planning a series of such demonstrations this spring and summer, to begin in Washington, D.C. They will have Negro and white participation, and they will seek to benefit the poor of both races.

This really meant making the movement powerful enough, dramatic enough, morally appealing enough so that people of goodwill—the churches, labor, liberals, intellectuals, students, poor people themselves—began to put pressure on congressmen to the point that they could no longer elude our demands.

We called our demonstration a campaign for jobs and income because we felt that the economic question was the most crucial that black people, and poor people generally, were confronting.

We would place the problems of the poor at the seat of government of the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind.