martin luther king importance essay

Martin Luther King Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on martin luter king.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an African-American leader in the U.S. He lost his life while performing a peaceful protest for the betterment of blacks in America. His real name was Michael King Jr. He completed his studies and attained a Ph.D. After that, he joined the American Civil Right Movement. He was among one of the great men who dedicated their life for the community.

Reason for Martin Luther King to be famous

There are two reasons for someone to be famous either he is a good man or a very bad person. Martin Luther King was among the good one who dedicated his life to the community. Martin Luther King was also known as MLK Jr. He gained popularity after he became the leader and spokesperson of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Martin Luther King was an American activist, minister, and humanitarian. Also, he had worked for several other causes and actively participated in many protests and boycotts. He was a peaceful man that has faith in Christian beliefs and non-violence. Also, his inspiration for them was the work of Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. For his work in the field of civil rights, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize.

He was a great speaker that motivated the blacks to protest using non-violence. Also, he uses peaceful strategies like a boycott, protest march , and sit-ins, etc. for protests against the government.

Impact of King

King is one of the renowned leaders of the African-American who worked for the welfare of his community throughout his life. He was very famous among the community and is the strongest voice of the community. King and his fellow companies and peaceful protesters forced the government several times to bend their laws. Also, kings’ life made a seismic impact on life and thinking of the blacks. He was among one of the great leaders of the era.

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Humanitarian and civil rights work

As we know that King was a civic leader . Also, he has taken part in many civil right campaigns and boycotts like the Bus Boycott, Voting Rights and the most famous March on Washington. In this march along with more than 200,000 people, he marched towards Washington for human right. Also, it’s the largest human right campaign in U.S.A. history. During the protest, he gave a speech named “I Have a Dream” which is history’s one of the renowned speeches.

Death and memorial

During his life working as a leader of the Civil Rights Movement he makes many enemies. Also, the government and plans do everything to hurt his reputation. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. Every year the US celebrates his anniversary as Martin Luther King Jr. day in the US. Also, they honored kings’ memory by naming school and building after him and a Memorial at Independence Mall.

Martin Luther King was a great man who dedicated his whole life for his community. Also, he was an active leader and a great spokesperson that not only served his people but also humanity. It was due to his contribution that the African-American got their civil rights.

Essay Topics on Famous Leaders

• Mahatma Gandhi
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• Jawaharlal Nehru
• Swami Vivekananda
• Mother Teresa
• Rabindranath Tagore
• Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel
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• Abraham Lincoln
• Martin Luther King

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Martin Luther King Jr.

By: History.com Editors

Updated: January 25, 2024 | Original: November 9, 2009

Martin Luther King Jr. was a social activist and Baptist minister who played a key role in the American civil rights movement from the mid-1950s until his assassination in 1968. King sought equality and human rights for African Americans, the economically disadvantaged and all victims of injustice through peaceful protest. He was the driving force behind watershed events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington , which helped bring about such landmark legislation as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act . King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and is remembered each year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day , a U.S. federal holiday since 1986.

When Was Martin Luther King Born?

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, Georgia , the second child of Martin Luther King Sr., a pastor, and Alberta Williams King, a former schoolteacher.

Along with his older sister Christine and younger brother Alfred Daniel Williams, he grew up in the city’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood, then home to some of the most prominent and prosperous African Americans in the country.

Did you know? The final section of Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech is believed to have been largely improvised.

A gifted student, King attended segregated public schools and at the age of 15 was admitted to Morehouse College , the alma mater of both his father and maternal grandfather, where he studied medicine and law.

Although he had not intended to follow in his father’s footsteps by joining the ministry, he changed his mind under the mentorship of Morehouse’s president, Dr. Benjamin Mays, an influential theologian and outspoken advocate for racial equality. After graduating in 1948, King entered Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, where he earned a Bachelor of Divinity degree, won a prestigious fellowship and was elected president of his predominantly white senior class.

King then enrolled in a graduate program at Boston University, completing his coursework in 1953 and earning a doctorate in systematic theology two years later. While in Boston he met Coretta Scott, a young singer from Alabama who was studying at the New England Conservatory of Music . The couple wed in 1953 and settled in Montgomery, Alabama, where King became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church .

The Kings had four children: Yolanda Denise King, Martin Luther King III, Dexter Scott King and Bernice Albertine King.

Montgomery Bus Boycott

The King family had been living in Montgomery for less than a year when the highly segregated city became the epicenter of the burgeoning struggle for civil rights in America, galvanized by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks , secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP ), refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus and was arrested. Activists coordinated a bus boycott that would continue for 381 days. The Montgomery Bus Boycott placed a severe economic strain on the public transit system and downtown business owners. They chose Martin Luther King Jr. as the protest’s leader and official spokesman.

By the time the Supreme Court ruled segregated seating on public buses unconstitutional in November 1956, King—heavily influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the activist Bayard Rustin —had entered the national spotlight as an inspirational proponent of organized, nonviolent resistance.

King had also become a target for white supremacists, who firebombed his family home that January.

On September 20, 1958, Izola Ware Curry walked into a Harlem department store where King was signing books and asked, “Are you Martin Luther King?” When he replied “yes,” she stabbed him in the chest with a knife. King survived, and the attempted assassination only reinforced his dedication to nonviolence: “The experience of these last few days has deepened my faith in the relevance of the spirit of nonviolence if necessary social change is peacefully to take place.”

Southern Christian Leadership Conference

Emboldened by the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in 1957 he and other civil rights activists—most of them fellow ministers—founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a group committed to achieving full equality for African Americans through nonviolent protest.

The SCLC motto was “Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed.” King would remain at the helm of this influential organization until his death.

In his role as SCLC president, Martin Luther King Jr. traveled across the country and around the world, giving lectures on nonviolent protest and civil rights as well as meeting with religious figures, activists and political leaders.

During a month-long trip to India in 1959, he had the opportunity to meet family members and followers of Gandhi, the man he described in his autobiography as “the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.” King also authored several books and articles during this time.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

In 1960 King and his family moved to Atlanta, his native city, where he joined his father as co-pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church . This new position did not stop King and his SCLC colleagues from becoming key players in many of the most significant civil rights battles of the 1960s.

Their philosophy of nonviolence was put to a particularly severe test during the Birmingham campaign of 1963, in which activists used a boycott, sit-ins and marches to protest segregation, unfair hiring practices and other injustices in one of America’s most racially divided cities.

Arrested for his involvement on April 12, King penned the civil rights manifesto known as the “ Letter from Birmingham Jail ,” an eloquent defense of civil disobedience addressed to a group of white clergymen who had criticized his tactics.

March on Washington

Later that year, Martin Luther King Jr. worked with a number of civil rights and religious groups to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a peaceful political rally designed to shed light on the injustices Black Americans continued to face across the country.

Held on August 28 and attended by some 200,000 to 300,000 participants, the event is widely regarded as a watershed moment in the history of the American civil rights movement and a factor in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 .

"I Have a Dream" Speech

The March on Washington culminated in King’s most famous address, known as the “I Have a Dream” speech, a spirited call for peace and equality that many consider a masterpiece of rhetoric.

Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial —a monument to the president who a century earlier had brought down the institution of slavery in the United States—he shared his vision of a future in which “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'”

The speech and march cemented King’s reputation at home and abroad; later that year he was named “Man of the Year” by TIME magazine and in 1964 became, at the time, the youngest person ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize .

In the spring of 1965, King’s elevated profile drew international attention to the violence that erupted between white segregationists and peaceful demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, where the SCLC and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had organized a voter registration campaign.

Captured on television, the brutal scene outraged many Americans and inspired supporters from across the country to gather in Alabama and take part in the Selma to Montgomery march led by King and supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson , who sent in federal troops to keep the peace.

That August, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act , which guaranteed the right to vote—first awarded by the 15th Amendment—to all African Americans.

Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The events in Selma deepened a growing rift between Martin Luther King Jr. and young radicals who repudiated his nonviolent methods and commitment to working within the established political framework.

As more militant Black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael rose to prominence, King broadened the scope of his activism to address issues such as the Vietnam War and poverty among Americans of all races. In 1967, King and the SCLC embarked on an ambitious program known as the Poor People’s Campaign, which was to include a massive march on the capital.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated . He was fatally shot while standing on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, where King had traveled to support a sanitation workers’ strike. In the wake of his death, a wave of riots swept major cities across the country, while President Johnson declared a national day of mourning.

James Earl Ray , an escaped convict and known racist, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted his confession and gained some unlikely advocates, including members of the King family, before his death in 1998.

After years of campaigning by activists, members of Congress and Coretta Scott King, among others, in 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed a bill creating a U.S. federal holiday in honor of King.

Observed on the third Monday of January, Martin Luther King Day was first celebrated in 1986.

Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

While his “I Have a Dream” speech is the most well-known piece of his writing, Martin Luther King Jr. was the author of multiple books, include “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,” “Why We Can’t Wait,” “Strength to Love,” “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” and the posthumously published “Trumpet of Conscience” with a foreword by Coretta Scott King. Here are some of the most famous Martin Luther King Jr. quotes:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

“The time is always right to do what is right.”

"True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

“Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.”

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.”

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

"I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant."

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

“Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. If you can't be a sun, be a star. For it isn't by size that you win or fail. Be the best of whatever you are.”

“Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?’”

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How Martin Luther King, Jr.’s multifaceted view on human rights still inspires today

The legendary civil rights activist pushed to ban nuclear weapons, end the Vietnam War, and lift people out of poverty through labor unions and access to healthcare.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. towers over history as a civil rights legend—known for leading the movement to end segregation and counter prejudice against Black Americans in the 1950s and 1960s, largely through peaceful protests. He helped pass landmark federal civil rights and voting rights legislation that outlawed segregation and enfranchised Americans who had been barred from the polls through intimidation and discriminatory state and local laws.  

( How the Voting Rights Act was won—and why it’s under fire today .)  

But King knew it would take more to achieve true equality. And so he also worked tirelessly for education, wage equity, peace, housing, and to lift people out of poverty. Some of King’s most iconic speeches and marches were devoted to ending war, dismantling nuclear weapons, and bringing economic justice. As King said after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 , he believed that any “spiritual and moral lag” in humanity was due to racial injustice, poverty, and war.  

His multifaceted view on human rights still inspires today, and on the third Monday in January every year, the United States honors King’s legacy of fighting for equal rights—and standing up for human rights everywhere.

During his lifetime, King’s views often made him unpopular and heralded harsh criticism. At the time of his assassination in 1968, a Harris poll revealed a low approval rating of only about 25 percent among white Americans and 52 percent among Black Americans. But in the decades after he was killed, more Americans came to recognize the enormity of King’s contributions. Communities across the country began to name streets and landmarks after him, and soon a push began to establish a federal holiday in his birth month of January.  

( Subscriber exclusive: Where the streets have MLK’s name .)

In 1983 , over objections from Southern lawmakers, President Ronald Reagan finally signed a bill creating the holiday into law and the first celebrations of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day took place in January 1986—although it would take another decade for states such as Arizona and South Carolina to follow suit.  

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King’s work continues to influence and inspire activism—particularly in the realm of environmental justice, as studies indicate that climate change disproportionately harms marginalized communities. Here are the many layers of King’s work that the U.S. honors on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  

He advocated against the use of nuclear weapons

King was adamant that peace was inextricably linked to civil rights. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, major powers like the United States and the U.S.S.R. were aggressively developing and testing nuclear weapons, and several times crept to the brink of warfare that threatened to annihilate the world.  

King made clear the connection between the Black freedom struggle and the need for nuclear disarmament, writes nuclear studies and African American history expert Vincent Intondi in the book African Americans Against the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Colonialism, and the Black Freedom Movement . King argued that it would be “rather absurd” to integrate schools and lunch counters but not be concerned with world peace and survival.

King spoke out about nuclear warfare as early as 1957, when he signed onto a full-page advertisement in The New York Times that called for all nations to suspend nuclear tests immediately. When asked about his stance later that same year, King tied the weapons to the whole of war, and argued that they should be banned everywhere.

“It cannot be disputed that a full-scale nuclear war would be utterly catastrophic,” he told Ebony magazine in an interview. “The principal objective of all nations must be the total abolition of war.”

As part of King’s advocacy for peace and nuclear disarmament, he condemned the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the U.S. government had carried out more than a decade earlier to effectively end World War II. Today, Hiroshima is one of the only cities outside North America to celebrate Martin Luther King Day.  

King also used the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962—a 13-day stretch in which the U.S. and Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war over the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba—as an opportunity to connect nuclear disarmament to racial and economic justice. King called for the U.S. government to instead turn its attention and funds to education, Medicare, and civil rights, Intondi writes. He then voiced his support for a nuclear test ban treaty , which was signed by President John F. Kennedy in 1963.  

He was outspoken against the Vietnam War

King often linked nuclear disarmament with the Vietnam War as it escalated in the 1960s.

King was against the war but initially worried that making his stance public would derail his work to pass the Civil Rights Act and impair his relationship with President Lyndon B. Johnson, according to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University .

But in 1965, the year the first U.S. ground troops were sent to Vietnam, King issued his first public statement, asserting the war was “accomplishing nothing” and calling for a peace treaty.

He tempered his criticism for the next two years to avoid diminishing the impact of his civil rights work, but by 1967, King was active in the anti-war sphere again, attending a march in Chicago before he went on to make his most notable speech on the matter a few days later on April 4.

It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament… may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation , and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine. Martin Luther King, Jr.

On that day at the Riverside Church in New York City, King denounced the war for deepening the problems of Black Americans and people living in poverty. He condemned the “madness” of Vietnam as a “symptom of a far deeper malady” that put the U.S. at odds with the aspirations for social justice throughout the world. Just 11 days later, King led 125,000 demonstrators on an anti-war march to the United Nations headquarters in New York as one of the largest peace demonstrations in history.

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During the last year of his life , King continued his anti-war work by encouraging grassroots peace activism. On March 31, 1968, five days before he died, King denounced the Vietnam War in his final Sunday sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., saying that it was “one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world.”

King did not live to see the war end. U.S. troops officially pulled out of Vietnam in April 1975 .

He championed union representation and worker’s rights

King's passion for union representation and workers' rights is also an important part of his legacy. Much as he had done with his anti-war speeches, King often tied workers’ rights to the civil rights movement.

“I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice,” King said in a 1958 speech in New York . “Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort, I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me.”

In a 1959 interview with Challenge magazine , King acknowledged that labor unions had historically left out Black Americans, but also could be a key to economic justice. He called for Black Americans to organize their economic and political power in the form of labor unions, and he championed ideas in the labor movement, including better working conditions, adequate housing, guaranteed annual income, and access to healthcare.

For years, King continued to call for economic justice, notably at the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Before a crowd of 250,000 people, he delivered the legendary “I Have A Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where he called for an end to poverty, especially targeted poverty and discrimination against Black Americans.

One of King’s last actions before his assassination was in support of the labor movement. King’s final days were spent supporting a group of Black sanitation workers striking in Memphis, Tennessee.  

After two workers had been crushed to death by a malfunctioning truck, 1,300 Black workers went on strike for 11 days, seeking an end to a long pattern of neglect and abuse from their management. The strike would’ve ended after the City Council voted to recognize their newly formed union, but the Memphis mayor rejected the vote. King traveled to Memphis to lead a protest march and, on April 3, he spoke to the striking sanitation workers.  

“We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end,” King said . “Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through.”

King was gunned down by an assassin on the balcony of his Memphis hotel the next day. On April 16, the sanitation workers’ union was finally recognized and a better wage was promised—the first of many examples of how King’s legacy would continue to reverberate in the work of those whom he inspired.

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. Martin Luther King, Jr.

He’s inspiring a new generation of environmental activists

Although King’s last act supporting the Black sanitation workers in Memphis was not explicitly an act of environmental justice , it has inspired a generation of activists. The working conditions the sanitation workers had endured were polluted and hazardous—much like the conditions many Black Americans endured in their communities and jobs at the time.

Modern environmental activists have drawn on King’s message: Much as segregation and discrimination were inseparable from poverty, they point out that poor communities of color disproportionately face environmental hazards such as pollution. They also bear the brunt of the harmful effects of climate change, including extreme weather events.

( The origins of environmental justice—and why it’s finally getting the attention it deserves .)

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in the use of federal funds , even gave marginalized people a means to address racial discrimination in environmental matters.   As the environmental justice movement grew, King’s work also inspired the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act.

His advocacy for people of color to have a voice and power has inspired many communities impacted most by climate change to speak up—and take action. Now, the holiday honoring King is typically observed as a national day of service. Organizations and individuals alike volunteer for their communities, often cleaning up roads or river banks in the name of a man who many believe would be on the forefront of the climate fight if he were still alive today.

Related Topics

• CIVIL RIGHTS
• HUMAN RIGHTS
• ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
• NUCLEAR WEAPONS
• VIETNAM WAR

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About Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. king jr..

Drawing inspiration from both his Christian faith and the peaceful teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. King led a nonviolent movement in the late 1950s and ‘ 60s to achieve legal equality for African-Americans in the United States. While others were advocating for freedom by “any means necessary,” including violence, Martin Luther King, Jr. used the power of words and acts of nonviolent resistance, such as protests, grassroots organizing, and civil disobedience to achieve seemingly-impossible goals. He went on to lead similar campaigns against poverty and international conflict, always maintaining fidelity to his principles that men and women everywhere, regardless of color or creed, are equal members of the human family.

Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Nobel Peace Prize lecture and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” are among the most revered orations and writings in the English language. His accomplishments are now taught to American children of all races, and his teachings are studied by scholars and students worldwide. He is the only non-president to have a national holiday dedicated in his honor and is the only non-president memorialized on the Great Mall in the nation’s capital. He is memorialized in hundreds of statues, parks, streets, squares, churches and other public facilities around the world as a leader whose teachings are increasingly-relevant to the progress of humankind.

Some of Dr. King’s Most Important Achievements

In 1957 , Dr. King was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization designed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. He would serve as head of the SCLC until his assassination in 1968, a period during which he would emerge as the most important social leader of the modern American civil rights movement.

In 1963 , he led a coalition of numerous civil rights groups in a nonviolent campaign aimed at Birmingham, Alabama, which at the time was described as the “most segregated city in America.” The subsequent brutality of the city’s police, illustrated most vividly by television images of young blacks being assaulted by dogs and water hoses, led to a national outrage resulting in a push for unprecedented civil rights legislation. It was during this campaign that Dr. King drafted the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the manifesto of Dr. King’s philosophy and tactics, which is today required-reading in universities worldwide.

Later in 1963 , Dr. King was one of the driving forces behind the March for Jobs and Freedom, more commonly known as the “March on Washington,” which drew over a quarter-million people to the national mall. It was at this march that Dr. King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which cemented his status as a social change leader and helped inspire the nation to act on civil rights. Dr. King was later named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.”

Also in 1964 , partly due to the March on Washington, Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, essentially eliminating legalized racial segregation in the United States. The legislation made it illegal to discriminate against blacks or other minorities in hiring, public accommodations, education or transportation, areas which at the time were still very segregated in many places.

The next year, 1965 , Congress went on to pass the Voting Rights Act, which was an equally-important set of laws that eliminated the remaining barriers to voting for African-Americans, who in some locales had been almost completely disenfranchised. This legislation resulted directly from the Selma to Montgomery, AL March for Voting Rights lead by Dr. King.

Between 1965 and 1968, Dr. King shifted his focus toward economic justice – which he highlighted by leading several campaigns in Chicago, Illinois – and international peace – which he championed by speaking out strongly against the Vietnam War. His work in these years culminated in the “Poor Peoples Campaign,” which was a broad effort to assemble a multiracial coalition of impoverished Americans who would advocate for economic change.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s less than thirteen years of nonviolent leadership ended abruptly and tragically on April 4th, 1968 , when he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. King’s body was returned to his hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, where his funeral ceremony was attended by high-level leaders of all races and political stripes.

• For more information regarding the Transcription of the King Family Press Conference on the MLK Assassination Trial Verdict December 9, 1999, Atlanta, GA. Click Here
• For more information regarding the Civil Case: King family versus Jowers. Click here .
• Later in 1968, Dr. King’s wife, Mrs. Coretta Scott King, officially founded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, which she dedicated to being a “living memorial” aimed at continuing Dr. King’s work on important social ills around the world.

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A Summary and Analysis of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘I Have a Dream’ is one of the greatest speeches in American history. Delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68) in Washington D.C. in 1963, the speech is a powerful rallying cry for racial equality and for a fairer and equal world in which African Americans will be as free as white Americans.

If you’ve ever stayed up till the small hours working on a presentation you’re due to give the next day, tearing your hair out as you try to find the right words, you can take solace in the fact that as great an orator as Martin Luther King did the same with one of the most memorable speeches ever delivered.

He reportedly stayed up until 4am the night before he was due to give his ‘I Have a Dream’, writing it out in longhand. You can read the speech in full here .

‘I Have a Dream’: background

The occasion for King’s speech was the march on Washington , which saw some 210,000 African American men, women, and children gather at the Washington Monument in August 1963, before marching to the Lincoln Memorial.

They were marching for several reasons, including jobs (many of them were out of work), but the main reason was freedom: King and many other Civil Rights leaders sought to remove segregation of black and white Americans and to ensure black Americans were treated the same as white Americans.

1963 was the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation , in which then US President Abraham Lincoln (1809-65) had freed the African slaves in the United States in 1863. But a century on from the abolition of slavery, King points out, black Americans still are not free in many respects.

‘I Have a Dream’: summary

King begins his speech by reminding his audience that it’s a century, or ‘five score years’, since that ‘great American’ Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This ensured the freedom of the African slaves, but Black Americans are still not free, King points out, because of racial segregation and discrimination.

America is a wealthy country, and yet many Black Americans live in poverty. It is as if the Black American is an exile in his own land. King likens the gathering in Washington to cashing a cheque: in other words, claiming money that is due to be paid.

Next, King praises the ‘magnificent words’ of the US Constitution and the Declaration of Independence . King compares these documents to a promissory note, because they contain the promise that all men, including Black men, will be guaranteed what the Declaration of Independence calls ‘inalienable rights’: namely, ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.

King asserts that America in the 1960s has ‘defaulted’ on this promissory note: in other words, it has refused to pay up. King calls it a ‘sacred obligation’, but America as a nation is like someone who has written someone else a cheque that has bounced and the money owed remains to be paid. But it is not because the money isn’t there: America, being a land of opportunity, has enough ‘funds’ to ensure everyone is prosperous enough.

King urges America to rise out of the ‘valley’ of segregation to the ‘sunlit path of racial justice’. He uses the word ‘brotherhood’ to refer to all Americans, since all men and women are God’s children. He also repeatedly emphasises the urgency of the moment. This is not some brief moment of anger but a necessary new start for America. However, King cautions his audience not to give way to bitterness and hatred, but to fight for justice in the right manner, with dignity and discipline.

Physical violence and militancy are to be avoided. King recognises that many white Americans who are also poor and marginalised feel a kinship with the Civil Rights movement, so all Americans should join together in the cause. Police brutality against Black Americans must be eradicated, as must racial discrimination in hotels and restaurants. States which forbid Black Americans from voting must change their laws.

Martin Luther King then comes to the most famous part of his speech, in which he uses the phrase ‘I have a dream’ to begin successive sentences (a rhetorical device known as anaphora ). King outlines the form that his dream, or ambition or wish for a better America, takes.

His dream, he tells his audience, is ‘deeply rooted’ in the American Dream: that notion that anybody, regardless of their background, can become prosperous and successful in the United States. King once again reminds his listeners of the opening words of the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

In his dream of a better future, King sees the descendants of former Black slaves and the descendants of former slave owners united, sitting and eating together. He has a dream that one day his children will live in a country where they are judged not by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.

Even in Mississippi and Alabama, states which are riven by racial injustice and hatred, people of all races will live together in harmony. King then broadens his dream out into ‘our hope’: a collective aspiration and endeavour. King then quotes the patriotic American song ‘ My Country, ’Tis of Thee ’, which describes America as a ‘sweet land of liberty’.

King uses anaphora again, repeating the phrase ‘let freedom ring’ several times in succession to suggest how jubilant America will be on the day that such freedoms are ensured. And when this happens, Americans will be able to join together and be closer to the day when they can sing a traditional African-American hymn : ‘Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last.’

‘I Have a Dream’: analysis

Although Martin Luther King’s speech has become known by the repeated four-word phrase ‘I Have a Dream’, which emphasises the personal nature of his vision, his speech is actually about a collective dream for a better and more equal America which is not only shared by many Black Americans but by anyone who identifies with their fight against racial injustice, segregation, and discrimination.

Nevertheless, in working from ‘I have a dream’ to a different four-word phrase, ‘this is our hope’. The shift is natural and yet it is a rhetorical masterstroke, since the vision of a better nation which King has set out as a very personal, sincere dream is thus telescoped into a universal and collective struggle for freedom.

What’s more, in moving from ‘dream’ to a different noun, ‘hope’, King suggests that what might be dismissed as an idealistic ambition is actually something that is both possible and achievable. No sooner has the dream gathered momentum than it becomes a more concrete ‘hope’.

In his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, King was doing more than alluding to Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation one hundred years earlier. The opening words to his speech, ‘Five score years ago’, allude to a specific speech Lincoln himself had made a century before: the Gettysburg Address .

In that speech, delivered at the Soldiers’ National Cemetery (now known as Gettysburg National Cemetery) in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in November 1863, Lincoln had urged his listeners to continue in the fight for freedom, envisioning the day when all Americans – including Black slaves – would be free. His speech famously begins with the words: ‘Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’

‘Four score and seven years’ is eighty-seven years, which takes us back from 1863 to 1776, the year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. So, Martin Luther King’s allusion to the words of Lincoln’s historic speech do two things: they call back to Lincoln’s speech but also, by extension, to the founding of the United States almost two centuries before. Although Lincoln and the American Civil War represented progress in the cause to make all Americans free regardless of their ethnicity, King makes it clear in ‘I Have a Dream’ that there is still some way to go.

In the last analysis, King’s speech is a rhetorically clever and emotionally powerful call to use non-violent protest to oppose racial injustice, segregation, and discrimination, but also to ensure that all Americans are lifted out of poverty and degradation.

But most of all, King emphasises the collective endeavour that is necessary to bring about the world he wants his children to live in: the togetherness, the linking of hands, which is essential to make the dream a reality.

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The Purpose of Education

Morehouse College, 1948

As I engage in the so-called “bull sessions” around and about the school, I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the “brethren” think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end.

It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the ligitimate goals of his life.

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

The late Eugene Talmadge, in my opinion, possessed one of the better minds of Georgia, or even America. Moreover, he wore the Phi Beta Kappa key. By all measuring rods, Mr. Talmadge could think critically and intensively; yet he contends that I am an inferior being. Are those the types of men we call educated?

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.

If we are not careful, our colleges will produce a group of close-minded, unscientific, illogical propagandists, consumed with immoral acts. Be careful, “brethren!” Be careful, teachers!

Essay on Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech

I have a dream: essay introduction, martin luther king’s speech: essay conclusion, reference list.

One of the finest explanations of American’s dream is the powerful speech of Martin Luther King, Jr. He delivered the speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, in Washington D.C. The speech is mainly centered on racial equality and stoppage of discrimination.

At that time, racial segregation ruled in almost all places: be it schools, neighborhoods and even in social places. With violence and riots so often, it was a disturbing moment for America although the U.S government was doing nothing to change the situation. Through the speech, Dr. King was educating inspiring and informing both the civil supporters and the unborn generation in the world to reach out to their dreams and giving his audience hope for a better future.

Up to the time when he was delivering the speech, African Americans were still under slavery from the white people as indicated in the below excerpt.

One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination…….One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land (Luther, 1963, para. 2).

The speech depicts the idea that someone can actually be anything that he dreams of becoming. Dr. King suggested that America is a land full of opportunities and that Americans should maximize on them. Before transforming the world, he saw the need to begin in America. Dr. King began the speech with a rhetoric phrase, ’Now is the time’, a tool that he used throughout speech. In the sixth paragraph of his speech, he used the phrase six times.

He was echoing to his audience to get hold of the moment. More so he used the phrase, ‘I have a dream eight times. By so doing he was echoing future hope for the people that will make them forget about all the slavery sufferings and injustices that they had faced while under slavery.

This is a sign of hope for the future too. He brought in the idea of slavery to suggest that it is still operational in today’s world. By using the word ‘slave-owners’, Dr. King was referring to the white, however to calm any tension between the black and the white people, he re-unites them by saying, “… will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood” (Luther, 1963, para.12).

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners ………, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice…. I have a dream today (Luther, 1963, para.12).

The dream in the above context symbolizes the aspirations that Dr. King had of America setting the stage for the rest of the world. He also says that ‘this nation will rise up’ meaning that he had fathomed a revolution time when the Americans will be accepted as right persons in the States (Luther, 1963, para.12).

There was an established racial discrimination that is why he sent such a strong message to the white. More importantly is the fact that his words were advocating for peace hence providing the vision that anyone would buy it. There above discussion hence shows that Martin Luther King, Jr was really, an effective public speaker.

Luther, M. (1963). I have a dream. Web.

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Important parts of Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy are often glossed over

Adrian Florido

Ongoing fights for voting rights and racial justice have sparked a reckoning over how Martin Luther King Jr.'s legacy is often invoked in that work.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

For many Americans, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is a day of public service, a time to volunteer in their communities. It's also a day when many of us reflect on the legacy of the late civil rights leader. NPR's Adrian Florido reports that ongoing fights for voting and racial justice have also sparked a reckoning over how King's legacy is often invoked in that work.

ADRIAN FLORIDO, BYLINE: When he was in Georgia last week calling on the Senate to pass federal voting rights legislation, President Biden had this prediction for how those opposing that legislation would mark today's King holiday.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Americans of all stripes will praise him for the content of his character. But as Dr. King's family said before, it's not enough to praise their father. They even said, on this holiday, don't celebrate his birthday unless you're willing to support what he lived for and what he died for.

FLORIDO: Biden was right. This morning, many of the senators opposing the voting rights bill tweeted tributes to King. The Reverend Adam Russell Taylor of Sojourners, a Christian social justice group, says the president was putting his finger on how commonly people wrap themselves in Dr. King's legacy for political expedience.

ADAM RUSSELL TAYLOR: Many politicians and others want to kind of self-select those pieces of King that they want to agree with. And actually, even some of those pieces, they take out of context, so, you know, his kind of famous words from his I Have A Dream speech.

(SOUNDBITE OF SPEECH)

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR: My four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

FLORIDO: That quote is often used to suggest King would support a conservative vision of a colorblind society, in which policies like affirmative action or voter protection laws are unnecessary.

TAYLOR: Not only does his words get taken out of context, but also there's willful amnesia of the totality of what he stood for.

FLORIDO: King was a vocal opponent of war, imperialism and materialism. He organized on behalf of poor people and revered voting as the cornerstone of political action and civil rights - aspects of his vision, Taylor says, that today are often ignored. In the case of the ongoing fight over voting rights, that amnesia, Taylor says, is dangerous.

TAYLOR: And it's a real betrayal to his life and legacy that 50 years later, voting rights is continuing to be a issue that's under assault. So those other pieces of what Dr. King stood for, I think, is something that we really do need to grapple with.

FLORIDO: Angela Lang says it's not only conservatives who she has recently encouraged to look critically at how they invoke Martin Luther King's legacy.

ANGELA LANG: My favorite quote from MLK - it's literally about the white moderate...

FLORIDO: From the letter King while locked up at the Birmingham Jail.

LANG: The white moderate sometimes being more harmful to our community because they say, oh, I agree with you; I don't agree with your methodology - you know, telling us to wait for a more convenient season to do some of our activism.

FLORIDO: Lang runs Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, a Milwaukee group that's been at the center of racial justice protests in that city. Among the pushback her work has faced, she says, is from people who've said they support her cause until protests have turned disruptive, like when they occupied a freeway.

LANG: You know, after George Floyd was murdered, I know a lot of folks took to Instagram and had the black square. But really, it still seems a little bit performative - so really challenging and saying, if you really want to honor Dr. King's legacy, are you part of the white moderate that he was talking about?

FLORIDO: For Lang, it's a question of intellectual honesty about what Dr. King really stood for.

LANG: People want to just remember the nice, positive things, the unity, the let's all come together. But really, it whitewashes a lot of his radical and, I think, more nuanced stances.

FLORIDO: And she says flattening that nuance does a disservice to the racial justice and civil rights fights of today. Adrian Florido, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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Rhetorical Analysis of Martin Luther King's Historic Speech

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Martin Luther King Jr. assassination anniversary: Here are 5 landmarks that reveal civil rights struggle

Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead 56 years ago today in Memphis, Tennessee . 

His assassin "hoped to kill MLK's great and widespread dream of unity," Alveda King, the civil rights leader's niece, posted on Thursday morning, April 4, on social media.

The killer failed in his mission, King wrote in her message. 

CHRISTIAN FILMMAKER JIM WAHLBERG SAYS MOTHER TERESA ‘LED ME’ TO GOD AND TO SOBRIETY IN PRISON

"Praise God … The dream didn't die with my uncle. His dream is alive, and so are our dreams; for our Lord Jesus is alive," she wrote.

The night before he was murdered, the powerful orator thundered prophetically from the pulpit of Bishop Charles Mason Temple in Memphis, "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord."

READ ON THE FOX NEWS APP

King Jr.'s death was only the first of several tragedies suffered by the family. Rev. A.D. King, Martin's little brother – Alveda King's father – died under mysterious circumstances the following year.

Her grandmother, Alberta King, also died shockingly. She was shot dead in 1974 in front of a Sunday congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia from where the King family led the civil rights movement.

King Jr.'s life on Earth ended in Memphis. But the civil rights movement he led marched across a vast swath of the country. 

Alveda King, when asked by Fox News Digital, suggested visiting these five landmarks in the civil rights movement to learn more about the march for justice – and the price paid by her family. 

Rev. A.D. King, just 18 months younger than his brother Martin Jr., was ministering at the First Baptist Church of Ensley and leading the Birmingham Campaign of the civil rights movement in the tumultuous year of 1963.

MEET THE AMERICAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, ALBERTA KING, ‘GAVE HER ALL FOR CHRIST’

Two bombs exploded at the reverend's home in an assassination attempt on May 11, while he was home with his wife, Naomi, and five children – including Alveda King, who was just 12 years old at the time.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. and his wife Alberta (Williams) King lived in a beautiful Queen Anne-style home at 501 Auburn Ave. when they welcomed three children: daughter Willie Christine and her younger brothers, Martin Jr. and Alfred Daniel (A.D.).

The home today is a centerpiece of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park. 

The home is closed for an "extensive rehabilitation project" through Nov. 2025 following an attempted arson attack in December 2023. 

The exterior remains a coveted bucket-list destination for photographs and selfies. 

The congregation was founded in 1886 with just 13 members. Rev. Adam Daniel Williams, MLK's Jr. grandfather, became minister in 1894. 

MEET THE AMERICAN WHO WROTE ‘THE BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC’

The church blossomed and became the spiritual headquarters of the civil rights movement under the Williams-King family by the 1950s. 

The church also grew famous for its choir and music , led by Alberta King, Martin Jr.'s mother. The choir performed at the Atlanta premier of the movie "Gone with the Wind" in 1939.  

Martin Luther King Jr. was both baptized at and mourned from Ebenezer Baptist on April 9, 1968. The funerals for both his brother and mother were held at the church, as well. 

The bridge over the Alabama River became the center of global attention on March 7, 1965, as civil rights demonstrators, marching to Birmingham in favor of voting rights, met a violent response on "Bloody Sunday."

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP FOR OUR LIFESTYLE NEWSLETTER

"The televised attacks were seen all over the nation, prompting public support for the civil rights activists in Selma and for the voting rights campaign," writes CivilRightsTrail.com.

The Edmund Pettus Bridget today is a National Historic Landmark and the frequent site of events and commemorations in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and the battle for civil rights.

Now the Bayfront Motel, the Monson Motor Lodge was the scene of one of the most unusual and disturbing events in the march for civil rights.

Alveda King cited it as a nearly forgotten event that speaks to the dangers faced by civil rights activists.

A bi-racial group of people plunged into the motor-lodge swimming pool on June 18, 1964, to protest segregation. 

James Brock, the manager of the inn, responded by pouring acid into the pool – a potentially disfiguring and even deadly attack. 

Photos of the shocking incident hit newspapers nationally. 

"The searing image helped propel passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing discrimination in public places," First Coast News of Florida wrote last year.

For more Lifestyle articles, visit www.foxnews.com/lifestyle .

Original article source: Martin Luther King Jr. assassination anniversary: Here are 5 landmarks that reveal civil rights struggle

In Martin Luther King's last speech, people remember the mountaintop but ignore the poor

If i told my friend back from the dead of the 24/7 gun violence in america, martin would know instinctively that it's an outgrowth of our capitalist society ignoring poverty..

Martin Luther King Jr. had no way of knowing that his speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968 , would be his last, so there is no real reason we should examine that text any differently than any of his others for meaning and message for the culture of the day.

However, humans are pattern-seeking animals, and it seems right that a final clue should be more telling than earlier ones. Having had a hand in helping Martin craft his speeches over the years, I can say with some authority that his final words on the subject of injustice in America were, in some ways, more prescient than many of his public statements.

People often focus on the “ I may not get (to the mountaintop) with you ” line, which is of course chilling in context, but I’d like to bring attention to an almost forgotten line: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to deal with the problems of the poor .”

Fifty-six years later – and I say this with all due respect to elected officials in counties, cities, states and even our U.S. Capitol who are trying to address these problems – with Martin’s assassination the day after this Memphis speech, the true last leader with real concern over the poor was taken out of the game.

What would James Baldwin and MLK say? Martin Luther King Jr. didn't live long enough to see how we've dismantled his legacy

How Martin Luther King would understand gun violence

If I told a Martin back from the dead of the 24/7 gun violence in the country – kids shooting each other in the streets of Chicago and Los Angeles and everywhere else, domestic disputes settled with pistol shots – he would assume it was the leading issue on the news and in the corridors of power. I’d tell him everyday shootings were the background noise these days, and only mass shootings get the headlines. Then I would have to describe what a mass shooting was.

And Martin would know instinctively that this violence is an outgrowth of our capitalist society ignoring the problems of the poor.

In a winner-take-all society, poverty is collateral damage. When we don’t worry about the have-nots, when we don’t offer real opportunity to solve their economic problems, they take things into their own hands. This involves gray and black markets, illicit dealings, self-policing and “street” justice. One of the “problems of the poor” is that crime (by necessity) and violence (by extension) permeates their world. This imbalance is injustice.

The Bible asks , What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world yet forfeit his soul? This appropriately describes the “American dilemma” of 2024. It’s easy to look away, or be distracted by shinier things.

Mass media and the internet would have us believe the preeminent issues confronting our nation are the contest for the presidency, the Russia-Ukraine War, illegal immigration, abortion or our public schools’ curriculum. All of these take a back seat to the epidemic of our citizens carelessly killing each other with cheap guns.

MLK always knew there were just and unjust laws

What the Civil Rights Movement taught America was that even though something wasn’t happening in one part of the country, the fact that it was happening at all poisoned the integrity of the entire country. Northern elites saw the police dogs and fire hoses of the South’s racist policies and said, “This doesn’t represent my country!”

That’s not happening now with poverty and gun violence because the leadership is not in place. If those in power don’t care that the poor are culling themselves with bullets, why should the rest of us concern ourselves? Particularly when they have an enshrined “right” to have guns?

Diversity, equity, inclusion: What are states legislating against DEI afraid of? The truth about our racist history.

Martin Luther King always knew there were just and unjust laws. In defying the unjust laws, the goal was to make them more just.

Is it impossible to believe that, like the legal code, our Constitution has some unjust features? Is it impossible to imagine that amendments can be repealed?

Standing up to the gun lobby, standing up to the defenders of a poorly written and terribly interpreted constitutional amendment, standing up to those who turn a blind eye to life and death matters – these are all a start at clearing out the poison in the American soul.

And maybe, preventing my friend Martin from having died in vain.

Is a presidential election more important than finding a way to stop our American killing fields, where blood is spilled by both illegal and constitutionally protected guns?

How we address this question is how Dr. King would define the “soul” of America in 2024.

Clarence B. Jones was personal attorney, adviser and speech writer for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and  credited as a co-author of King's 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech . He is chairman of the board of the Spill the Honey Foundation and co-founder of the Clarence B. Jones Institute for Social Advocacy. His new memoir, written with Stuart Connelly, is " The Last of The Lions ."

Three Essays on Religion

Author:  King, Martin Luther, Jr.

Date:  September 1, 1948 to May 31, 1951 ?

Location:  Chester, Pa. ?

Genre:  Essay

Topic:  Martin Luther King, Jr. - Education

In the following three essays, King wrestles with the role of religion in modern society. In the first assignment, he calls science and religion “different though converging truths” that both “spring from the same seeds of vital human needs.” King emphasizes an awareness of God’s presence in the second document, noting that religion’s purpose “is not to perpetuate a dogma or a theology; but to produce living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience.” In the final handwritten essay King acknowledges the life-affirming nature of Christianity, observing that its adherents have consistently “looked forward for a time to come when the law of love becomes the law of life.”

"Science and Religion"

There is widespread belief in the minds of many that there is a conflict between science and religion. But there is no fundamental issue between the two. While the conflict has been waged long and furiously, it has been on issues utterly unrelated either to religion or to science. The conflict has been largely one of trespassing, and as soon as religion and science discover their legitimate spheres the conflict ceases.

Religion, of course, has been very slow and loath to surrender its claim to sovereignty in all departments of human life; and science overjoyed with recent victories, has been quick to lay claim to a similar sovereignty. Hence the conflict.

But there was never a conflict between religion and science as such. There cannot be. Their respective worlds are different. Their methods are dissimilar and their immediate objectives are not the same. The method of science is observation, that of religion contemplation. Science investigates. Religion interprets. One seeks causes, the other ends. Science thinks in terms of history, religion in terms of teleology. One is a survey, the other an outlook.

The conflict was always between superstition disguised as religion and materialism disguised as science, between pseudo-science and pseudo-religion.

Religion and science are two hemispheres of human thought. They are different though converging truths. Both science and religion spring from the same seeds of vital human needs.

Science is the response to the human need of knowledge and power. Religion is the response to the human need for hope and certitude. One is an outreaching for mastery, the other for perfection. Both are man-made, and like man himself, are hedged about with limitations. Neither science nor religion, by itself, is sufficient for man. Science is not civilization. Science is organized knowledge; but civilization which is the art of noble and progressive communal living requires much more than knowledge. It needs beauty which is art, and faith and moral aspiration which are religion. It needs artistic and spiritual values along with the intellectual.

Man cannot live by facts alone. What we know is little enough. What we are likely to know will always be little in comparison with what there is to know. But man has a wish-life which must build inverted pyramids upon the apexes of known facts. This is not logical. It is, however, psychological.

Science and religion are not rivals. It is only when one attempts to be the oracle at the others shrine that confusion arises. Whan the scientist from his laboratory, on the basis of alleged scientific knowledge presumes to issue pronouncements on God, on the origin and destiny of life, and on man's place in the scheme of things he is [ passing? ] out worthless checks. When the religionist delivers ultimatums to the scientist on the basis of certain cosomologies embedded in the sacred text then he is a sorry spectacle indeed.

When religion, however, on the strength of its own postulates, speaks to men of God and the moral order of the universe, when it utters its prophetic burden of justice and love and holiness and peace, then its voice is the voice of the eternal spiritual truth, irrefutable and invincible.,

"The Purpose of Religion"

What is the purpose of religion? 1  Is it to perpetuate an idea about God? Is it totally dependent upon revelation? What part does psychological experience play? Is religion synonymous with theology?

Harry Emerson Fosdick says that the most hopeful thing about any system of theology is that it will not last. 2  This statement will shock some. But is the purpose of religion the perpetuation of theological ideas? Religion is not validated by ideas, but by experience.

This automatically raises the question of salvation. Is the basis for salvation in creeds and dogmas or in experience. Catholics would have us believe the former. For them, the church, its creeds, its popes and bishops have recited the essence of religion and that is all there is to it. On the other hand we say that each soul must make its own reconciliation to God; that no creed can take the place of that personal experience. This was expressed by Paul Tillich when he said, “There is natural religion which belongs to man by nature. But there is also a revealed religion which man receives from a supernatural reality.” 3 Relevant religion therefore, comes through revelation from God, on the one hand; and through repentance and acceptance of salvation on the other hand. 4  Dogma as an agent in salvation has no essential place.

This is the secret of our religion. This is what makes the saints move on in spite of problems and perplexities of life that they must face. This religion of experience by which man is aware of God seeking him and saving him helps him to see the hands of God moving through history.

Religion has to be interpreted for each age; stated in terms that that age can understand. But the essential purpose of religion remains the same. It is not to perpetuate a dogma or theology; but to produce living witnesses and testimonies to the power of God in human experience.

[ signed ] M. L. King Jr. 5

"The Philosophy of Life Undergirding Christianity and the Christian Ministry"

Basically Christianity is a value philosophy. It insists that there are eternal values of intrinsic, self-evidencing validity and worth, embracing the true and the beautiful and consummated in the Good. This value content is embodied in the life of Christ. So that Christian philosophy is first and foremost Christocentric. It begins and ends with the assumption that Christ is the revelation of God. 6

We might ask what are some of the specific values that Christianity seeks to conserve? First Christianity speaks of the value of the world. In its conception of the world, it is not negative; it stands over against the asceticisms, world denials, and world flights, for example, of the religions of India, and is world-affirming, life affirming, life creating. Gautama bids us flee from the world, but Jesus would have us use it, because God has made it for our sustenance, our discipline, and our happiness. 7  So that the Christian view of the world can be summed up by saying that it is a place in which God is fitting men and women for the Kingdom of God.

Christianity also insists on the value of persons. All human personality is supremely worthful. This is something of what Schweitzer has called “reverence for life.” 8  Hunan being must always be used as ends; never as means. I realize that there have been times that Christianity has short at this point. There have been periods in Christians history that persons have been dealt with as if they were means rather than ends. But Christianity at its highest and best has always insisted that persons are intrinsically valuable. And so it is the job of the Christian to love every man because God love love. We must not love men merely because of their social or economic position or because of their cultural contribution, but we are to love them because  God  they are of value to God.

Christianity is also concerned about the value of life itself. Christianity is concerned about the good life for every  child,  man,  and  woman and child. This concern for the good life and the value of life is no where better expressed than in the words of Jesus in the gospel of John: “I came that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly.” 9  This emphasis has run throughout the Christian tradition. Christianity has always had a concern for the elimination of disease and pestilence. This is seen in the great interest that it has taken in the hospital movement.

Christianity is concerned about increasing value. The whole concept of the kingdom of God on earth expressing a concern for increasing value. We need not go into a dicussion of the nature and meaning of the Kingdom of God, only to say that Christians throughout the ages have held tenaciouly to this concept. They have looked forward for a time to come when the law of love becomes the law of life.

In the light of all that we have said about Christianity as a value philosophy, where does the ministry come into the picture? 10

1.  King may have also considered the purpose of religion in a Morehouse paper that is no longer extant, as he began a third Morehouse paper, “Last week we attempted to discuss the purpose of religion” (King, “The Purpose of Education,” September 1946-February 1947, in  Papers  1:122).

2.  “Harry Emerson Fosdick” in  American Spiritual Autobiographies: Fifteen Self-Portraits,  ed. Louis Finkelstein (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), p. 114: “The theology of any generation cannot be understood, apart from the conditioning social matrix in which it is formulated. All systems of theology are as transient as the cultures they are patterned from.”

3.  King further developed this theme in his dissertation: “[Tillich] finds a basis for God's transcendence in the conception of God as abyss. There is a basic inconsistency in Tillich's thought at this point. On the one hand he speaks as a religious naturalist making God wholly immanent in nature. On the other hand he speaks as an extreme supernaturalist making God almost comparable to the Barthian ‘wholly other’” (King, “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,” 15 April 1955, in  Papers  2:535).

4.  Commas were added after the words “religion” and “salvation.”

5.  King folded this assignment lengthwise and signed his name on the verso of the last page.

6.  King also penned a brief outline with this title (King, “The Philosophy of Life Undergirding Christianity and the Christian Ministry,” Outline, September 1948-May 1951). In the outline, King included the reference “see Enc. Of Religion p. 162.” This entry in  An Encyclopedia of Religion,  ed. Vergilius Ferm (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946) contains a definition of Christianity as “Christo-centric” and as consisting “of eternal values of intrinsic, self-evidencing validity and worth, embracing the true and the beautiful and consummated in the Good.” King kept this book in his personal library.

7.  Siddhartha Gautama (ca. 563-ca. 483 BCE) was the historical Buddha.

8.  For an example of Schweitzer's use of the phrase “reverence for life,” see Albert Schweitzer, “The Ethics of Reverence for Life,”  Christendom  1 (1936): 225-239.

9.  John 10:10.

10.  In his outline for this paper, King elaborated: “The Ministry provides leadership in helping men to recognize and accept the eternal values in the Xty religion. a. The necessity of a call b. The necessity for disinterested love c. The [ necessity ] for moral uprightness” (King, “Philosophy of Life,” Outline, September 1948-May 1951).

Source:  CSKC-INP, Coretta Scott King Collection, In Private Hands, Sermon file.

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