Happy birthday, Dr. Martin Luther King
Happy birthday to Dr. Martin Luther King (1929 – 1968).
“Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout ‘White Power!’ — when nobody will shout ‘Black Power!’ — but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.”
“In an effort to achieve freedom in America, Asia, and Africa we must not try to leap from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, thus subverting justice. We must seek democracy and not the substitution of one tyranny for another. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man. We must not become victimized with a philosophy of black supremacy.”
“Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men. God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race.”
“The problem is not a purely racial one, with Negroes set against whites. In the end, it is not a struggle between people at all, but between justice and injustice. Nonviolent resistance is not aimed against oppressors but against oppression. Under its banner consciences, not racial groups, are enlisted.”
“The important thing about man is ‘not his specificity but his fundamentum,’ not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but the quality of his soul.”
“Properly speaking, races do not marry. Individuals marry.”
“As I stand here and look out upon the thousands of Negro faces, and the thousands of white faces, intermingled like the waters of a river, I see only one face — the face of the future.”