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Truth: Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. 
 
Clergyman, Civil Rights Leader, Writer, Human Rights Activist
 
(1929-1968)

Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. 

 

Additional Quotes by Martin Luther King, Jr. 

  • A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus. 
  •  A lie cannot live. 
  • A man can't ride your back unless it's bent. 
  • A man who won't die for something is not fit to live. 
  • A nation or civilization that continues to produce soft-minded men purchases its own spiritual death on the installment plan. 
  • A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom. 
  • A right delayed is a right denied. 
  • A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. 
  • A riot is the language of the unheard. 
  • All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. 
  • All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem. 
  • Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better. 
  • An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. 
  • An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law. 
  • At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love. 
  • Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. 
  • Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. 
  • Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them. 
  • Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. 
  • Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. 
  • Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation. 
  • He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. 
  • History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.  
  • Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. 
  •  Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. 
  •  I am not interested in power for power's sake, but I'm interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good. 
  •  I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. 
  • 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. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood. 
  • I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear. 
  • I just want to do God's will. And he's allowed me to go to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. 
  • I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. 
  • I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word. 
  • I submit that an individual who breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.
  • I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live. 
  • I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law. 
  • If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

 

Biography

Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of a Baptist minister. He completed his formal education with degrees from Morehouse College, Crozier Theological Seminary and Boston University (Ph. D. in Systematic Theology, 1955). While serving as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, he led the boycott which resulted in the desegregation of that city’s bus system. His resolve in the face of threats to his safety as well as that of his family, his conviction that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and his ability to write and speak with extraordinary power and clarity brought him to national prominence as a leader of the movement to achieve racial justice in America.


He studied the writings and example of Mohandas K. Gandhi in India who powerfully influenced his philosophy of non-violence. When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King said: “Non-violence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.” Like Gandhi, King also understood the strategic value of non-violence “We have neither the techniques nor the numbers to win a violent campaign.” His commitment to non-violence led him to oppose the American war in Viet Nam.

Like Henry David Thoreau, Dr. King believed in the necessity of resisting unjust laws with civil disobedience. As a leader of many demonstrations in support of the rights of African-Americans, he was subject to frequent arrest and imprisonment. His Letters from a Birmingham Jail (1963) was a call to conscience directed primarily at American religious leaders.

When a fellow civil rights worker was killed after the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, King said: “If physical death is the price that some must pay to save us and our white brothers from eternal death of the spirit then no sacrifice could be more redemptive.” Martin Luther King’s own redemptive sacrifice was exacted by an assassin’s bullets on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.


 

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Indian Policy and the Black Hills

       

Sitting Bull                                         Russell Means

 

Our ideas will overcome your ideas.  We are going to cut the country’s whole value system to shreds.  It isn’t important that there are only 500,000 of us Indians….What is important is that we have a superior way of life.  We Indians have a more human philosophy of life.  We Indians will show this country how to act human.  Someday this country will revise its constitution, its laws, in terms of human beings, instead of property.  If Red Power is to be a power in this country it is because it is ideological….What is the ultimate value of a man’s life?  That is the question.

Vine Deloria, Jr., In Touch the Earth, 159 

 

It’s no wonder that the Indian cannot understand the white way or that native people have come to assume that whites are only capable of cultural theft of art, medicine, and ideas, of human labor and of land.  Sitting Bull articulated the cultural clash of worldviews and the resulting tragedy for the Sioux nation which defended the Indian way:

What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken?  Not one.  What treaty that the white man ever made with us has the white man ever kept?  Not one.  When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land, they sent ten thousand men to battle.  Where are the warriors today?  Who slew them?  Where are our lands?  Who owns them?  What white man can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his money?  Yet they say I am a thief.  What white woman, however lonely, was ever captive or insulted by me?  Yet they say I am a bad Indian.  What white man has ever seen me drunk?  Who has ever come to me hungry and unfed?  Who has ever seen me beat my wives or abuse my children?  What law have I broken?  Is it wrong for me to love my own?  Is it wicked for me because my skin is red?  Because I am Lakota, because I was born where my father died, because I would die for my people and country?

Quoted in Peter Matheissen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 33

 

And now, five hundred years later, the colonizers still seek treasure.  Today treasure is not gold, but uranium; Indians within the United States are not reduced to slaves, but leaders are criminalized and imprisoned.  Law is able to accomplish what the whip and sword accomplished in the time of Columbus.  Just as Chief Guaironex and Sitting Bull cherished the land, Lakota leader Russell Means fights for the Black Hills today:

Right now, today, we who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation are living in what white society has designated a National Sacrifice Area.  What this means is that we have a lot of uranium deposits here, and white culture (not us) needs this uranium as energy production material.  The cheapest and most efficient way for industry to extract and deal with the processing of this uranium is to dump the waste by-products right here at the digging sites.  Right here where we live.  This waste is radioactive and will make the entire region uninhabitable forever.  This is considered by industry, and the white society that created th is industry, to be an “acceptable” price to pay for energy resource development.  Along the way they also plan to drain the water table under this part of South Dakota as part of the industrial process, so the region becomes doubly uninhabitable.  This same sort of thing is happening down in the land of the Navajo and the Hope, up in the northern Cheyenne and Crow, and elsewhere….

We are resisting being turned into a National Sacrifice Area.  We are resisting being turned into a national sacrifice people.  The costs of this industrial process are not acceptable to us.  It is genocide to dig the uranium here and drain the water table, no more, no less.

Quoted in Peter Mattheissen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 525

 

It’s sadly ironic that the clash between the red and white vision is symbolized today in the Black Hills, the sacred land of the Great Sioux nation.  A legal fight rages over the 1868 Sioux claim to South Dakota lands, including seven and a half million acres of the Black Hills that were “lost” when Congress nullified the 1868 treaty following Custer’s defeat.  In the 1980s when the Sioux appealed to the Supreme Court, the government’s “right” to the land was upheld.  But the Sioux nation, faithful to tribal ethics and believing the earth is sacred and not for sale, refused the money.

The Black Hills is the land where the U.S. government chose to symbolize its democratic achievement. Chiseled into the stone hills of South Dakota are the faces of Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt.  The government of the United States seeks to renovate the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial in South Dakota—“a shrine of democracy,” according to President Bush.  The Sioux nation protests!  “Not only did they desecrate our sacred land,” said Tim Giago, an Oglala Sioux who is editor of the Lakota Times, “they also memorialized four Presidents who committed acts of atrocity against our people…They want to spend $40 million to repair Mr. Rushmore and it’s 70 miles from the poorest country in American, where our people are destitute (Chu and Shaw, 69-70).

Destitute indeed!  The annual income in the area is twenty-four hundred dollars, with an unemployment rate of eighty-five percent (Chu and Shaw, 70).  Impoverished and defiant, the Sioux will not accept money for the sacred.  Who is spiritually destitute, spiritually alive?  If the lands of the Americas are to be saved from destruction, it is the Indians of America, who by their faithful reverence for the living world will save it.  This sacred love of all beings is the profound spiritually that has enabled Indian people to continue to resist five hundred years of assault and degradation.  Indian spirituality is the hidden cultural weapon that sustains resistance in the face of hardship and death.  Penned in reservations, marginalized, made invisible, the red nations refuse to die. 

Five hundred years after the conquest of the Americas, an environmental crisis confronts the world.  Scientists predict that the destruction of the rainforest, industrial pollution, acid rain, nuclear radiation, and destruction of animal species has so altered the environment that the earth itself is in mortal danger.  Some of the Indian medicine people echo the Indian prophecy which foretells apocalyptic destruction as a result of the whites’ failure to respect the mother, Earth.  Lakota Wallace Black Elk articulates that vision:

The white people have to surrender their arms to the great Spirit.

This purification is coming real soon, and all the guns and gold will melt.  The holy spirit, the atom, the power of god, will melt those guns and tanks and poison gasses they create….They will be standing by themselves….When the time comes there won’t be no amnesty.

We’re going back to the beginning of time…I have no  fear, I have no slightest fear whatsoever.  Even if I have to face death like Chief Big Foot, it’s very beautiful.

We hold the key to eternity, where it is beautiful and it is everlasting for everyone.  That’s where we’re going.  We’re going home.  And finally we will be back in the Great Spirit’s hands again.  Grandmother’s arms again.  She’ll cradle us in her arms again.

Quoted in Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 547

 

Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a Micmac Indian, faced her own death with the same openness that Black Elk reveals.  A mother and activist involved at Wounded Knee, she was mysteriously murdered and found frozen in the snow in a remote area of Pine Ridge reservation.  Her hands were cut off and sent in a jar to the FBI in Washington for a fingerprint check.  Her sister, Mary Lafford believes someone connected with the FBI killed her.  AIM leader Dennis Banks said that her killer was not just the triggerman but the cultural triggerman of centuries.  “She wasn’t killed by just one person.  It was what she represented and what kin of person she was.  What happens to people in four hundred years?  Maybe that is the answer.  Maybe four hundred years killed Anna Mae” (Matthiessen, 268).