Almost everything you will hear quoted Monday will be from the years 1964-1968. Four years of his whole life’s work is the shallow well from which liberals will draw their water.
What you are not going to hear on Monday are any quotes from his less famous years. The years he said what he believed and not what gave him fame.
He spoke conservative truths that resonate today in the emerging black conservative community from the early 50’s. He was passionate about helping black Americans in 1954 become all they could be in his mid 20’s during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and worked tirelessly until he was in his mid 30’s without wavering from fundamental black conservative principles.
It is easy to point to the pivotal day of his conversion; The Jobs and Freedom rally in Washington DC in August 1963 (he was 34 years old) with nearly a half million cheering people hanging on his every word. He used this platform to promote Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill. This became law in 1964.
Fame is deceiving. From that point forward he said what the crowd cheered for and not what he really believed. The last 4 years of his life were governed by influences that caused the fame and acclimation to take the place of principle
He was murdered just after his 39th birthday.
He was a great man who believed in right principles that became perverted by the spotlight and voices around him filling his mind with more and more liberal fantasies. The power corrupting and absolute power corrupting principle held.
Here’s what you WON’T hear on Monday when the Liberals co-opt the stage like they did at Rosa Park’s funeral. They are shameless.
“Whatever your life’s work is, do it well,” he advised. “If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music.”
“Set out to do a good job,” not “a good Negro job.” Three years later, he was even more adamant: “We must seek to do our life’s work so well that nobody could do it better. The Negro who seeks to be merely a good Negro, whatever he is, has already flunked his matriculation examination for entrance into the university of integration.” Even the later King touted this line. “[W]e must work assiduously to aspire to excellence,” he proclaimed in 1967.
He excoriated schoolteachers “who can’t even speak the English language” and wouldn’t know a verb “if it was as big as that table.” “For a college graduate to be standing up talking about ‘you is,’” he charged, “there is no excuse for it.” He added angrily: “And some of these people are teaching our children and crippling our children.”
“Let’s live within our means. Save our money and invest it in meaningful ends.” Blacks shouldn’t spend more than they could afford on houses and cars, he counseled, and they should especially “stop wasting money on frivolities,” such as “all these alcoholic beverages.” “It would be one of the tragedies of this century,” he maintained, “if it is revealed that the Negroes spent more money for frivolities than we spent for the cause of freedom and justice and for meaningful ends.”
If blacks were to integrate themselves into America, King felt, black crime rates had to fall. “Let’s be honest with ourselves and say that . . . our standards have lagged behind at many points,” he declared in 1957. “Negroes constitute ten percent of the population of New York City, and yet they commit thirty-five percent of the crime,” he observed.
“We can begin a constructive program which will vigorously seek to improve our personal standards,” he said. “It is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of high maturity, to rise to the level of self-criticism,” King declared. “Through group unity we must convey to one another that our women must be respected, and that life is too precious to be destroyed in a Saturday night brawl, or a gang execution.”
“Through community agencies and religious institutions, we must develop a positive program through which Negro youth can become adjusted to urban living and improve their general level of behavior.”
He pointed out in 1957 that, in St. Louis, “the Negroes constitute twenty-six percent of the population, and yet seventy-six percent of the persons on the list for [A]id to [D]ependent [C]hildren are Negroes.” Several years later, he regretted that “56 percent of Negro children at some point in their lives have been recipients of public aid.”
He echoed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s argument that government handouts are a potential “narcotic” that can result in “moral disintegration,” robbing welfare clients of their “self-respect, their self-reliance and courage and determination.”
Shortly before his assassination, King even began to speak of a black “underclass”—“an underclass that is not a working class.” In King’s view, those who belonged to this group, “alienated from the routines of work,” lacked the “habits of discipline” that enable someone to succeed in the workplace. How could self-help be the road to success for people who seemed bent on destroying themselves?
"When these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters," King wrote in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, "they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence."
So you read it here. You can also read all about it here and here and here
Happy Birthday Dr King
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