if you can t run, walk speech

For more on King’s involvement with nuclear disarmament campaigns, see Norman Cousins and Clarence Pickett to King, 9 March 1958, in Papers 4:379-380. If you can’t walk, crawl – but move,” he told his enthusiastic audience, which interrupted his 10-minute talk nine time to … You don’t have to be a doctor to see something is very wrong. It will not only quicken his imagination but kindle his enthusiasm for the objects of his imagination. Communism is based on an ethical relativism and a metaphysical materialism that no Christian can accept. Don't stand if you can sit. Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son,” in The Weary Blues (New York: Knopf, 1926), p. 107. This is your challenge! At that time it was the only high school for Negroes in the whole city of Atlanta, the Booker T. Washington High School. If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving. There was a time when we had a choice of violence or nonviolence, but today it is either nonviolence or nonexistence. Well, life for none of us has been a crystal stair, but we must keep moving. It’s all right to even hate, but dress your hate up into garments of love and make it appear that you are loving when you are actually hating. Theologians would say it is the love of God operating in the human heart. All rights reserved (About Us). I imagine you already know that I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic. I know you are asking, “What do you mean about this love thing—you are talking about people who oppose you, loving people who are trying to misuse you, seeking to defeat you—what in the world are you trying to say? They made cotton king, and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions. Each of you should serve as a committee of one to work with your parents if they have not registered to vote and other people in the community. King was asked to investigate Cleveland's Because the minute one feels that way, he is incapable of rising to his full maturity as a person. And so every black person in this country must rise up and say I’m somebody; I have a rich proud and noble history, however painful and exploited it has been. For if man fails to reorientate his life around moral and ethical values he may well destroy himself by the misuse of his own instrument. It gives us not only knowledge, which is power, but wisdom, which is control. Our power does not lie in Molotov cocktails. The basic thing is to keep moving. And I believe this because however much America has strayed away from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the goal of America is freedom. Now the first thing that we must do is to develop within ourselves a deep sense of somebodiness. Everybody is doing it, so it must be all right, and therefore we are caught in the clutches of conformity. Poverty there is so widespread, because these people have been exploited economically and dominated politically by foreign powers. And so I say, let us keep moving, let us move on toward the goal of brotherhood, toward the goal of personal fulfillment, toward the goal of a society undergirded by justice. Victor Hugo said many years ago, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”15 The idea whose time has come is in the idea of freedom and human dignity. If you can’t run a half-marathon—run a 5K. If you can't walk, then crawl. You must never become complacently adjusted to unobtained goals; you have been in this mountain long enough, “turn ye and take your journey.”4. Whoever can slick his way through makes it through all right, according to this theory. For here you have discovered a way of struggle which combines the militant and the moderate; a way of struggle that combines the realistic and the idealistic; a way of struggle that combines the calm and courageous. I do believe that in America we must use our vast resources of wealth to bridge the gulf between abject, deadening poverty and superfluous, inordinate wealth. William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116” (1609). We know about this mountain, we have been in it long enough. AD 46-120) was a Greek essayist and biographer. But Jesus says “Love them,” and love is greater than like. Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the pivotal leaders of the American civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr.: Cleveland appearances, The Plain Dealer's Roldo Bartimole reported, Read a bit more about the quote's history, this and other uses of poetry in King's speeches online, Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, 1965 commencement address at Oberlin College, John Legend's version of "Pride (In the Name of Love), Martin Luther King Jr.'s Glenville High School speech. Clayborne Carson, Tenisha Armstrong, Susan Carson, Adrienne Clay, and Kieran Taylor, eds. This means that we’ve got to study hard, we’ve got to stay in school. King’s associates James Lawson and Ella Baker had expressed similar thoughts in their own public remarks on the sit-ins. And whenever God speaks he says go forward, saying in substance that you must never become bogged down in mountains and situations that will impede your progress. This expression means that a person should back up their talking with action. Go on and do it anyhow. If you can’t run, walk. If you have dyspraxia, there's a good chance somebody has commented about the awkward way you walk or run. Again, I know the social problems that cause many Negroes to drop out of school but I urge you today to develop that rugged determination: Stay in school, stick with to the end. Blues singer Ishman Bracey’s 1928 recording of “Trouble Hearted Blues” included the following lyric: “Down so long, down don’t worry me.”. We must not wait for the day of full emancipation before we set out to achieve certain basic developments in our lives. Mobile readers: The full audio file is available here: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Glenville High School speech. And I say to myself as I look at these conditions, “I know where we can store that food free of charge, in the wrinkled stomachs of hungry men and women and children of God all over the world.” If the United States is to survive, along with all the citizens of the world, we must come out of this mountain of practical materialism which can be transformed from a legitimate individualism into a rugged individualism, and we must move out of that into a proper concern for all humanity and into a proper concern for every individual, and a proper concern in our individual lives for what I call the within of life—the realm of destiny. Anthologists after his death revised the words, and they have been honed by a kind of literary game of telephone into the version King noted. We have been in it too long. In a sense, we are no longer concerned about the ten commandments—they are not too important. This is the mountain that we must leave—we have dwelt in it long enough. According to this view, anything that works is all right if you can get by with it. I have faith in the future because I have faith in God and I believe that there is a power, a creative force in this universe seeking at all times to bring down prodigious hilltops of evil and pull low gigantic mountains of injustice. And I close by quoting a beautiful little poem from the pen of Langston Hughes, where he has a mother, talking to a son. So many people can’t think critically. and East Tech) and at the Cleveland Job Corps Center for Women that day. And I am convinced that if we are to be a great nation, and if we are to solve the problems of the world we must come out of this mountain. It is hard to like some senator who waters down the civil rights bill in Congress; it is pretty hard to like him. Of course capitalism has done some marvelous things for our nation and the world. To learn more, read his essays "Nonviolence: The Only Road to Freedom" and "The Power of Non-violence" and go to the website of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. You have to be walking around as if you're just thinking, reflecting, sometimes to make a point, and stop, talk. As she was introducing me, I felt something like the old maid who had never been married. And if you still can't decide, Hespanhol suggested this: "Why not do both — running and walking — in order to get the best of each?" So, this afternoon, I would like to deal with three or four symbolic mountains that we have been in long enough—mountains that we must move out of if we are to go forward in our world and if civilization is to survive. The underlying philosophy of segregation is diametrically opposed to the underlying philosophy of democracy and Christianity and all the sophisms of the logicians cannot make them lie down together. it is an everfixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. Segregation is wrong because it assumes that God made a mistake—and finally, it is wrong because it stands in the face of the great American creed “that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” And so we must go out and say to our nation and say to South Africa and say to the world, that we have been in the mountain of segregation too long and now we must move out. But this afternoon, I am concerned mainly with the second group, the individuals who didn’t want to go back to Egypt necessarily and yet didn’t want to go on to the Promised Land, the individuals who chose the line of least resistance. And we can transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows through this method. Negroes had to sit in the back. When I was a student there we had 7,000 students in that one school. Bull Connor, Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Ala., was one of the most notorious Southern advocates of harsh tactics to defeat the civil rights movement. Research suggests Malloch's version was an adaptation of a long-existing poem. In a typescript of this speech, King elaborated: “I was thinking yesterday that I would say that it was just a few years ago that I used to assemble in Sisters Chapel, in fact I used to sing in the chorus and the glee club at Morehouse, so I had the priviledge of coming here quite frequently. When men rise to live on this level, they come to see all men as children of the almighty God, and they can look in the eyes of the opponent and love him in spite of his evil deed. For a discussion of "Negro," "black," "African-American" and other terms, read a 2010 Los Angeles Times column about the inclusion of "Negro" on census forms. But I’m still young so that doesn’t particularly matter” (King, “Founders Day address,” 10 April 1960). Please c, ontact Intellectual Properties Management (IPM), the exclusive licensor of the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. at, American Prophet: Online Course Companion, Freedom's Ring: King's "I Have a Dream" Speech, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Volume V: Threshold of a New Decade, January 1959-December 1960. 116 We use cookies to enhance your experience on our website. For I'se still goin', boy, I'se still climbin', and life for me ain't been no crystal stair. Spelman College president Albert Manley had initially invited King to address the college in 1959 (Manley to King, 16 October 1958; see also Ballou to Manley, 10 November 1958, and Program, “Founders Day, seventy-ninth anniversary,” 10 April 1960). It is one of the glowing epics of the time and I predict that it will win—that it will have to win, because this demand is a basic American demand. They taught all of us that, that we should feel that we are as good as any other children. Our power does not lie in bricks and stones. It was Longfellow who said, “The heights of great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept were toiling upward in the night.” And I urge you today to realize that doors of opportunities are opening now that were not open to our mothers and our fathers. King was a Baptist minister, one of the few leadership roles available to black men at the time. Enough of our parents don’t register and vote. Don't you set down on the steps 'cause you finds it's kinder hard. Another consequence of this moral and ethical relativism is that we have developed a sort of pragmatic test for right and wrong. But as soon as they got out of Egypt by crossing the Red Sea, they discovered that before they could get to the promised land they would have to go through a long and difficult wilderness. If it falls your lot to be a streetsweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures. And so I come to you today and urge you to work in the civil rights movement, to join the civil rights organizations, to give of your time and your activity, when you have spare time, in community action. Then there is another word, philia, which is a sort of intimate affection between personal friends. You see, education has a two-fold function. This type of moral and ethical relativism is sapping the very life’s blood of the moral and spiritual life of our nation and our world. But what if you suddenly can't get the words out, or can't say them in your usual way? - Malcolm Reynolds, Firefly I know this isn't entirely said by Mal, by I … In a real sense, education must help an individual think intensively, critically, imaginatively. Hugo actually wrote, "On résiste à l'invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas à l'invasion des idées" -- literally translated, that's about how you can resist the invasion of an army, but not the invasion of ideas. But the danger point is that we will become so involved in the profit-making and profit-getting aspects of capitalism that we will forget certain ends of life. If you can't be a highway, just be a trail. I am speaking of a practical materialism, which means living as if there were nothing else that had reality but fame and material objects. It is now time for us to turn and take our journey toward the promised land of integration. I speak as one who has had to stand often amidst the surging murmur of life’s restless sea, I speak as one who has been battered often by the jostling winds of adversity, but I have faith in the future. We are struggling to save the soul of America. m_gallery_permalink = "http://photos.cleveland.com/4501/gallery/martin_luther_king_jr_cleveland_appearances/index.html"; If you can't run, then walk. Martin Luther King Jr Quotes - If you can't fly, then run. BUT DO WHAT YOU CAN! In a sense, this is the sort of love that you have for your roommate, the persons that you like and eat dinner with and the persons you like to talk to on the telephone. That we are persons. And so the nations of the world must get together. Oh no! Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views. 8. This PBS report identifies Marcus Garvey as the first popularizer. It was a fire within. King combined two concepts that are familiar slogans of the era and beyond. We have been in this mountain long enough. God is not interested merely in the freedom of the whole human race. Black is as beautiful as any color and we must believe it. The students have taken the passionate longings of the ages and filtered them in their own souls and fashioned a creative protest. There's a 10-minute documentary with clips of Connor ("You've got to keep the black and the white separate") on YouTube. 14. but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward. The metaphorical phrase to run before one can walk is also common. And I had to ride the bus from home every morning to the other side of town. In Geneva they must get together; at the Summit Conference they must get together, to bring an end to the armament race, to bring about universal disarmament and set up a sort of world police force.16 This is a matter of survival now. The beautiful thing about it is that you are not merely demanding service at the lunch counter, though that is a basic part of it. m_gallery_pagetype = "embed"; And I want to assure you today that the idea whose time has come in our day and our generation is the idea of freedom and human dignity. Then you had a second group that abhored the idea of going back to Egypt and yet could not quite attain the discipline and the sacrifice to go on to Canaan. It is interesting that the Greek language comes to our rescue and our aid at this point. An individual who is properly educated must have more than efficiency. Actually, Emerson wrote something in his journal that was much less euphonious. How very delighted I am to be here this morning and to have the great privilege and opportunity of sharing with you and being with you here in the city of Cleveland. Baker published “Bigger than a Hamburger” in the May 1960 issue of the Southern Patriot: “The Student Leadership Conference made it crystal clear that current sit-ins and other demonstrations are concerned with something much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized coke.”. As Moses sought to lead his people on, he discovered that there were those among them who would occasionally become emotionally and sentimentally attached to a particular spot so that they wanted to stay there and remain stationary at that point. If you can’t run 3 miles—run 1 mile. I do not stand here as a detached spectator.

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