Martin Luther King

It's six days past his birthday but on this national holiday, here are some excerpts of my favorite essays by Martin Luther King.  I posted them last year, but they are still my favorites.  They may not be as well-known as the quotes that are typically associated with him, but I feel they give us a glimpse into what it means to be human, to challenge oneself and to rise to challenges that present themselves in our lives.

When most people think of MLK, they tend to think of him as a person who fought for the rights of non-whites.  In reality, he was a true fighter of injustice in our country.  I think the following paragraphs are important as they show us a man who provides a beautiful example of someone open enough to challenge his assumptions about race and injustice. 

"Often the question has arisen concerning my own intellectual pilgrimage to nonviolence.  In order to get at this question, it is necessary to go back to my teens in Atlanta.  I had grown up abhoring not only segregation, but also the oppressive and barbaous acts that grew out of it... All of these things had done something to my growing personality.  I had come perilously close to resenting all white people."

"I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.  Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort, I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me.  During my late teens I worked two summers, against my fathers wishes--he never wanted my brother and me to work around white people because of the oppressive conditions--in a plant that hired by Negroes and whites.  Here I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro.  Through these early experiences I grew up deeply conscious of the varieities of injustice in our society." 

-My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, Martin Luther King, Jr.

And, later on, in the same essay,  King talks about becoming aware of the teachings of Gandhi and nonviolent resistence.  I find it meaningful  that he thought he was just studying a philosophy and would never have chance to practice it.

"In 1954 I ended my formal training with all of these relatively divergent intellectual forces converging into a positive social philosophy. One of the main tenets of this philosophy was the conviction that nonviolent resistance was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their quest for social justice. At this time, however, I had merely an intellectual understanding and appreciation of the position, with no firm determination to organize it in a socially effective situation."

"When I went to Montgomery as a pastor, I had not the slightest idea that I would later become involved in a crisis in which nonviolent resistance would be applicable. I neither started the protest nor suggested it. I simply responded to the call of the people for a spokesman. When the protest began, my mind, consciously or unconsciously, was driven back to the Sermon on the Mount, with its sublime teachings on love, and the Gandhian method of nonviolent resistance. As the days unfolded, I came to see the power of nonviolence more and more. Living through the actual experience of the protest, nonviolence became more than a method to which I gave intellectual assent; it became a commitment to a way of life. Many of the things that I had not cleared up intellectually concerning nonviolence were now solved in the sphere of practical action."

-My Pilgrimage to Nonviolence, Martin Luther King, Jr.

And, from his most famous speech, "Facing the Challenge of a New Age".

"First we are challenged to rise above the narrow confines of our individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. The new world is a world of geographical togetherness. This means that no individual or nation can live alone. We must all learn to live together, or we will be forced to die together. This new world of geographical togetherness has been brought about, to a great extent, by man's scientific and technological genius. Man through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place time in chains; he has been able to carve highways through the stratosphere.  Through our scientific genius we have made of the world a neighborhood; now through our moral and spiritual genius we must make of it a brotherhood. We are all involved in the single process. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. We are all links in the great chain of humanity."

Today is not only a day of respect, but a day of service.  If you have the opportunity to help another, please take it.  It is the best way to honor this great man.