The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The crucial question, then, is this: Is there any help to be found in the religion of Jesus that can be of value here? It is utterly beside the point to examine here what the religion of Jesus suggests to those who would be helpful to the disinherited. That is ever in the nature of special pleading. No man wants to be the object of his fellow’s pit

“Dr. King’s job was to interpret the ideology and theology of non-violence,” said Abernathy. “My job was more simple and down-to-earth. I would tell [people], ‘Don’t ride those buses.’”

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