* “Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote. In focusing the attention of the nation and the world today on the flagrant denial of the right to vote, we are exposing the very origin, the root cause, of racial segregation in the...
martin luther king jr.
Marching on Washington for Economic and Social Justice
* “Timid supplication for justice will not solve the problem. We have got to confront the power structure massively.” —Martin Luther King Jr. “If all the discriminatory laws in the United States were immediately repealed, race would still remain as one of the most pressing moral and political problems in the nation. . . . […]
“Nineteen Sixty-Three Is Not an End But a Beginning . . .”
* Another Sweltering Summer of Legitimate Discontent In this disheartening summer that has seen the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—because, the chief justice tells us, its protections are no longer needed—amid vigorous rollbacks of voting rights and access in states with Republican-controlled legislatures; and that has seen a shockingly unjust […]
Read All About the 1963 March on Washington
Recommended Reading about a Movement Still Moving While we’re working on a longer piece about the great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of August 28, 1963, we’d like to point you to some writings about the event that we think are worth spending some time...
RFK, MLK: “This mindless menace of violence in America”
“Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit [of hatred and revenge] flourish any longer in our land.” —Robert F. Kennedy, April 5, 1968 * On the day after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., then senator...
4/4, 44 Years Ago . . .
“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” —Aeschylus * It was the night of April 4, 1968, when word spread that the Rev. Martin Luther King...
“There Is a Creative Force in This Universe”
The Poor People’s Campaign, 40 Years before Occupy Wall Street “Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. . . . God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others...
How the World Has—and Has Not—Changed in 50 Years
* Portraits of Courage, Struggle, and Defiance This is the mug shot of Joan Trumpauer, a 19-year-old Duke University student and SNCC member who was arrested by the Jackson, Mississippi, police with eight other activists as they arrived on a train from New Orleans to...
Rev. King and Gun Violence: “Study War No More”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahI8o9-U7Z0&feature=player_embedded * “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” —Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Declaration...
“Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam”
In the first two years after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. maintained a skeptical but moderate and relatively quiet position on the war in Vietnam. He spoke out forcefully and at length against the war on April 4,...
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: January 15, 1929–April 4, 1968
“I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness’ of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts him.