Twitter and Facebook are atwitter with MLK quotes in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. I think that’s great, but I hope we are not reducing the preacher to sound bites and notable quotables. King wrote and spoke with power.  It was partly the way he formed his words. He was well-read, he quoted great philosophers and leaders. He was a remarkable writer. He was an even more amazing orator. The rise and of fall of his rich, baritone voice, his cadence, his conclusions which rallied his hearers into a crescendo of applause – his oratorical style is the envy of every preacher and politician.

But what gave his words such great power was not his vocabulary or his delivery. I believe it was the strength of his character – he was willing to give his life to the cause of social justice. And this was a check that was cashed, when he was assassinated in 1968. You cannot easily dismiss the words of one who believed so passionately in the cause.

Here’s the famous quote that Dr. King wrote about waiting for justice to come on its own.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

Here is the context of that quote:

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth of time. I received a letter this morning from a white brother in Texas which said: ‘All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it it possible that you are in too great of a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost 2000 years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.:

All that is said here grows out of a tragic misconception of time. It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills.

Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.

We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

I like how King ended his letter, with a note of humility and a Pauline-like reference to his context, in jail:

Never before have I written a letter this long (or should I say a book?). I’m afraid that it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else is there to do when you are alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think strange thoughts, and pray long prayers?

MLK – Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Here a are a few more MLK quotes regarding the use of time for justice:

Interviewer: Would you call yourself a gradualist, in terms of integration?

MLK: “I think not. The word gradualism…is so often an excuse for escapism and do-nothingism which ends up in stand-stillism.”

When you are right, you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong you cannot be too conservative.

To ignore evil is to become an accomplice to it.

Any religion which professes to be concerned with the souls of men and is not concerned with the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them, is a dry-as-dust religion.

Finally, I’ve compiled a Youtube Playlist of a few favorites, followed by the entire “I Have a Dream” speech.