Words of wisdom – Dr Martin Luther King

Yesterday, April 4, marked 54 years since the great African American civil rights activist, Dr. Martin Luther king Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Significantly, Dr. King who had earned a reputation as a non-violent civil rights activist and freedom fighter died by an assassin’s bullet.

To this date the truth behind his murder is still to be fully revealed but it is not by chance that he was killed, as he was broadening his message beyond civil rights for African Americans to encompass broader issues concerning humanity, including opposition to the criminal war being waged at the time by the USA against the people of Vietnam.

Three years before MLK’s assassination, another noted Afro-American freedom fighter, Malcolm X Shabazz, was also brutally gunned down.

Malcolm had gotten a reputation as a hardline opponent of “integration” and, unfairly, an advocate of violence. It was when he began to broaden his message too that the powers that be moved against him. Like MLK, there is still controversy over who were the architects of his assassination, but it is clear whose interests were served by the callous slaying of these great African liberators.

On the occasion of Dr. King’s murder, a few quotes from his speeches are quite in order -words of wisdom.

Read on:

“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward”.

“Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love”.

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets, even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his work well’ “As my sufferings mounted, I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation, ——either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course”.

“Science investigates, religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals”.

Words of wisdom indeed.