MARTIN LUTHER KING jr. What he said

During the last few years of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a series of presentations advocating, among other things, for better housing and job opportunities for minorities, while encouraging them to reach beyond themselves. Some excerpts:

“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.”

— July 1967 speech, referring to a lack of work and dignity for many blacks, as well as other conditions, that led to the 1965 Watts riots near Los Angeles.

“What insane logic it is to condemn the robbed man because his possession of money precipitates the evil act of robbery. Society must condemn the robber and never the robbed. … We must condemn those who are perpetuating the violence, and not those individuals who engage in the pursuit of their constitutional rights ...”

— Responding to those who accused King of creating hostility in white communities by staging open housing marches in the summer of 1966 in Chicago.

“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 38 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 you want to live longer. … Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.”

— Nov. 5, 1967, sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

“And I’m simply saying this morning that you should resolve that you will never become so secure in your thinking or your living that you forget the least of these. … I try to get it over to my children early, morning after morning, when I get the chance. … And I said to my little children, ‘I’m going to work and do everything I can do to see that you get a good education. I don’t ever want you to forget that there are millions of God’s children who will not and cannot get a good education, and I don’t want you feeling that you are better than they are.’”

— Sermon delivered Jan. 7, 1968.

Source: “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.”