EDITORIAL: Honoring the legacy of a hero.
In the 37 years since his assassination, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has become America’s icon of racial equality.
Ask any schoolchild and they will tell you that Dr. King fought for equality or against prejudice and that he believed in non-violence. But Dr. King’s legacy is far greater than that.
The slain civil rights leader, who would have turned 77 this past Sunday, was also a passionate critic of the larger American society, its materialism and economic disparity. And he was a fierce opponent of the Vietnam War and all wars.
What follows is Dr. King’s own words. It is our way of honoring his memory.
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?" (1967)
"Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love." Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, Sweden, Dec. 11, 1964
"Man was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh." "Why We Can’t Wait" (1963)
"The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty." "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?" (1967)
"Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true." "Strength To Love" (1963)
"I am aware that there are many who wince at a distinction between property and persons who hold both sacrosanct. My views are not so rigid. A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on; it is not man." "The Trumpet of Conscience" (1967)
"Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love." "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?" (1967)