Quotations - Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial (U.S. National Park Service)

the intervening years, a religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression, must not tempt us into believing that it was thus in the mind and life of Jesus. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” Wherever his spirit appears, the oppressed gather fresh courage; for he announced the good news that

Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this when he said, “If a person sweeps streets for a living, he should sweep them as Michelangelo painted, as Beethoven composed music, as Shakespeare wrote his plays.”

“I have a dream that 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,” said Dr. King,32 appealing to white Americans’ pride in their country as the Land of Opportunity and their sense of fairness, and making common cause with them in their hopes fo