Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

It was so crucial to the Civil Rights Movement that on June 23, 1963, Martin Luther King came to town, walked down Woodward Avenue with more than 100,000 people and delivered the first major public iteration of his "I Have A Dream" speech, two months before he did it in Washington.

The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.

In this country, these Negro leaders have Negroes sittin' - sitting down, thinking that that - there's dignity towards sitting in.

Martin Luther King really was a safety valve for white people. Any time it appeared that the black community was on the verge of really doing what we ought to do based on having been attacked, they put Martin Luther King on television. He was always saying, "We must use nonviolence. We must overcome hate with love." White people loved that. That's why they gave him a Nobel Prize. But when Martin Luther King started condemning the Vietnam War, that's when white people turned against him.

Obviously, In The Heat Of The Night was a landmark movie because the timing was perfect. It was in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement.

The majority of the Negroes who took part in the year-long boycott of Montgomery's buses were poor and untutored; but they understood the essence of the Montgomery movement; one elderly woman summed it up for the rest. When asked after several weeks of walking whether she was tired, she answered: "My feet is tired, but my soul is at rest.

Once the white man let the Negro get an education, the Negro began to want what the white man has. But he let Negroes get an education and now they are demanding integration; they want to have exactly what he has. And the white man is not going to give it to them!

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was 'well timed,' according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This 'wait' has almost always meant 'never.' We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that 'justice too long delayed is justice denied.'

These Negroes who go for integration and intermarriage are linking up with the very people who lynched their fathers, raped their mothers, and put their kid sisters in the kitchen to scrub floors.

You got two black folk representing us through the Sixties. One of them was for violence, one was against it, and they both are dead.

The white man supports Reverend Martin Luther King, subsidizes Reverend Martin Luther King, so that Reverend Martin Luther King can continue to teach the Negroes to be defenseless - that's what you mean by nonviolent - be defenseless in the face of one of the most cruel beasts that has ever taken people into captivity - that's this American white man, and they have proved it throughout the country by the police dogs and the police clubs.

In America right now, the people who talk about race the most are people of color - and if we are going to move the needle forward, it's WHITE people who need to acknowledge their role in racism.

I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country. They are not-in Mississippi. They are not-in Montgomery. That is why I am here today. . . . You want to shut up every colored person who wants to fight for the rights of his people!.

The Negro's problem will not be solved by running away.

The South opposes the civil rights of Negroes and their protection by law. Witness lynchings where no one is punished, witness the Jim Crow laws that deny the letter and spirit of the Constitution. For democracy to have real meaning, the Negro must have the same civil rights as any other American citizen. It seems obvious that the South does not yet know what this war is all about

What I did at Ole Miss had nothing to do with going to classes. My objective was to destroy the system of white supremacy.

It's not easy to be a martyr in the field of race relations.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

When you think of 244 years of slavery and 81 years of that finally you are going to be allowed to be part of the pool from which people choose jobs. That's not a substantive kind of move, but it was very important.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

The civil rights movement didn't begin in Montgomery and it didn't end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.

I remember being at the church a few hours after the church was bombed in Birmingham, the 16th Street Baptist Church. It was very hard and very difficult to stand on that corner across the street from the church. Or to go Mississippi and search for the three civil rights workers who came up missing. There is a lot of trauma.

I was in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses in the '60s.

Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's sons, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.