Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of freedom for the African Americans was closely linked with dreams of political and economic equality. He often referred to the civil rights movement in America as simply one expression of a social democratic revolution. ‘Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children,’¹ King told the delegates at the Negro American Labour Council (NALC) convention in May 1965. King emerged from the Montgomery bus boycott as a supporter, but also with a critique, of American democracy. The new black civil resistance movement made his dream of democratizing the American democracy true. It is important to emphasize on the theme of ‘democratizing democracy’ in King’s political philosophy because of its importance in identifying the nature of his non-violent action and his understanding of American democracy.

King was for immediate social integration in the Montgomery bus boycott, but he knew well that he needed time to talk about political equality and human dignity of the African Americans in the deep South in 1955. Not surprisingly, his message was mostly heard in the northern states. ‘Major northern newspapers, magazines, and other media carried prominent and favourable stories about King and the boycott. Calling the boycott, the "miracle in Alabama", the Nation said that it "represents a fulfillment of the American dream… of freedom and equality and the dignity and worth of every human being".’² Martin King was applauded by many for his courage, but he knew that he had to develop a clear perspective on America in order to be understood by white and black Americans. He, therefore, urged the black community in particular, and the Americans in general to develop a larger and greater understanding of American democracy as a dream.’

‘The phrase "American dream" began to appear in Martin King’s addresses in the late 1950s. He talked about a "dream of our American democracy" in the presence of Vice President Richard Nixon, in an address to a meeting of the Committee on Government Contracts, a meeting held at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, D.C., on 11 May 1959. By the beginning of the 1960s the phrase had emerged as a frequently used symbol of his perspective on America and the black struggle in it, as seen in such titles of his addresses as "The Negro and the American Dream" and "The American Dream".’³

Martin Luther King knew well that the American dream was the centrepiece of a national cohesion, which holds the country’s citizens tightly together. But, he also knew that it had multiple meanings for people elsewhere in the world. To some, it represented an American domination of the world, to others a symbol of good life and achievement. In short, from the early 1960s King understood that the American dream was not only the dream of the Americans, but the dream of others to change America with the help of Americans.

From the very beginning America, the land of freedom, has also been the world’s dream: a society built on new foundations, held together not by traditions, but by the idea of a generous and hospitable country open to any experience. The secret of the power of the American dream lay in the ‘invention’ of America as a dream. After all, the discovery of America by Columbus enshrined the American dream as the founding principle of the nation. The idea that Columbus’s journey represented a dream rather than a mere arrival had many consequences. It defined America as the ‘new world’ and cast its past into an imaginary time.

 

In the centuries after Columbus, fresh images of America both perpetuated and expanded the narrative of the American dream. A central part of this narrative has been a persistent faith in the values of the American democratic tradition as an indispensable guardians of personal dignity and individual opportunity. This narrative found a ready echo in the political experience and social aspirations of King, trying to include his own dream in the narrative of the American dream. ‘King derived the meaning of the expression "American dream" from two sources: the American liberal democratic tradition, as defined by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and the biblical tradition of the Old and New Testaments, as interpreted by Protestant liberalism and the black church. During the second half of the 1950s and first half of the 1960s, King drew these sources into a coherent and powerful image of the nation’s future.’⁴

 

Martin King insisted on inalienable rights, as suggested in the Declaration of Independence, as the point of distinction between American democracy and totalitarian regimes. But since these rights were declared as God-given, they were, ipso facto, grounded in the sacred time of eternity and could not be violated. That is why King was pretty sure that even white Americans, in their hatred of the blacks, would not allow themselves to violate the moral vision of American democracy.

But he also knew that democracy for African Americans was not a given fact and it needed to be demanded by using American democratic institutions. ‘One of the great glories of American democracy’, Dr. King would say, ‘is that we have the right to protest for rights. This is a non-violent protest. We are depending on moral and spiritual forces, using the method of passive resistance.’⁵

Martin Luther King very clearly found some of the answers to his questions on democracy in Gandhi or in some of the towering figures of American democracy such as Jefferson and Lincoln. In an interview to Life magazine, King affirmed: ‘People cannot devote themselves to a great cause without finding someone who becomes the personification of the cause. People cannot become devoted to Christianity until they find Christ, to democracy until they find Lincoln and Jefferson and Roosevelt, to Communism until they find Marx and Lenin…’⁶ Interestingly enough, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were always present in Martin King’s mind during his campaign for civil rights. For example, in his Autobiography, King makes several references to these two great American presidents: ‘If you had visited Birmingham before the third of April in the one-hundredth-anniversary year of the Negro’s emancipation, you might have come to a startling conclusion. You might have concluded that here was a city which had been trapped for decades in a Rip Van Winkle slumber; a city whose fathers had apparently never heard of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, the Bill of Rights, the Preamble to the Constitution, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, or the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools.’⁷

 

The March on Washington and the famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech were also done in the spirit of Lincoln and in front of his Memorial. But King also gave his historical action and speech a radical edge, which showed that laws were vital to democracy, but needed to be disobeyed when they became unjust and anti-democratic. According to Bayard Rustin the march succeeded, ‘because it was the product of sound political philosophy and intelligent, responsible strategy.’⁸ As King had always repeated, his political philosophy was mainly founded on the teachings of Jesus Christ while his strategy followed Gandhi’s method of non-violent resistance.

But Dr. King owed his passion of freedom to the works and actions of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and all the great leaders of American democracy. He spells out this passion in his Autobiography, preparing the reader for his majestic speech entitled ‘I Have a Dream’. ‘We had strength’, writes King, ‘because there were so many of us, representing so many more. We had dignity because we knew our cause was just. We had no anger, but we had a passion – a passion for freedom. So we stood there, facing Mr. Lincoln and facing ourselves and our own destiny and facing the future and facing God.’⁹

 

King’s symbolic march across history, ‘from the promises of American Revolution to the unfinished business of the Civil War’¹⁰ at the same time revealed to the world the incomplete project of American democracy. But King himself stressed the significance of the American democratic tradition as an adequate framework to set the American house in order. However, it was a painful irony that a country that had been a pioneer in giving shape to the spirit of democracy in the modern world had to correct itself through its own principles. King underlines this ambivalence in the political life of Thomas Jefferson, another great figure of American democracy.

In the case of Jefferson, as King puts it, we have ‘the intellectual and moral recognition that slavery is wrong, but the emotional tie to the system is so deep and pervasive that it imposes an inflexible unwillingness to root it out. Thomas Jefferson reveals the same ambivalence. There is much in the life of Jefferson that can serve as a model for political leaders in every age; he came close to the ideal ‘philosopher-king’ that Plato dreamed of centuries ago. But in spite of this, Jefferson was a child of his culture who had been influenced by the pseudo-scientific and philosophical thought that rationalized slavery… Jefferson’s majestic words, ‘all men are created equal’, meant for him, as for many others, that all white men are created equal. Yet in his heart Jefferson knew that slavery was wrong and that it degraded the white man’s mind and soul.’¹¹ What King tries to show here is that despite the self-delusion of white Americans that all Americans are equal, the struggle for equality and the end of segregation is a battle which needs to be won by taking into account the mechanisms of American democracy. This is only possible by being courageous and tenacious on the principles of democracy.

 

For King, only men like Abraham Lincoln had been capable of surmounting ‘the haunting ambivalence’ of American democracy. ‘This strange duality toward the Negro and slavery’, affirmed Dr. King, ‘vexed the mind of Abraham Lincoln for years. Few men in history have anchored their lives more deeply in moral convictions than Abraham Lincoln, but on the question of slavery Lincoln’s torments and vacillations were tenacious.’¹² Reading these lines, one can tell why King himself was so tenacious in insisting on the process of democratizing American democracy. As a matter of fact, one can say that all King’s writings, speeches and actions in the civil rights movement were illustrations of and footnotes of this tenacity in returning American democracy to its founding principle of inclusion and interconnectedness.

Ultimately, for King, democracy had to be just and compassionate. As such, he was a patriot, but also an anti-imperialist. His celebrated and awe-inspiring ‘Beyond Vietnam’ speech given at the Riverside Church in New York was a public condemnation of the American involvement in Southeast Asia. ‘I don’t believe’, wrote King in A Testament of Hope, ‘we can have world peace until America has an "integrated" foreign policy. Our disastrous experiences in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic have been, in one sense, a result of racist decision making. Men of the white West, whether or not they like it, have grown up in a racist culture, and their thinking is coloured by that fact… They don’t really respect anyone who is not white. But we simply cannot have peace in the world without mutual respect.’¹³

 

King set a radical tone against the war in Vietnam in an interview with journalist David Halberstam in 1967 by insisting on the idea of reforming American institutions. His radical proposals included control over the military-industrial complex which was greatly responsible for the war in Vietnam. As such, King vehemently attacked American foreign policy in Vietnam as a new form of colonialism leading to a national disaster, accusing the U.S. government as ‘the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.’¹⁴ While calling the Vietnam war a form of ‘madness’, King remained true to his moral conviction that war in Vietnam meant getting involved in injustice abroad.

Meanwhile, King’s anatomy of American engagement in Vietnam revealed ‘a kind of arrogance of power.’¹⁵ Against such arrogance, King suggested the two imperatives of justice and morality. In order to bring justice to the victims of war in Vietnam, King proposed the removal of poverty in the black ghettos. King believed that the decision had to be made: either war in Vietnam or war on poverty in the U.S. Maybe that is why King called the war in Vietnam ‘a far deeper malady within the American spirit.’¹⁶ King criticized the United States for being on the wrong side of the revolution against poverty and exploitation.

 

Interestingly, at the centre of King’s radical attack against the Vietnam war was his account of the radical transformation in America, substituting a ‘person-oriented’ society for a ‘thing-oriented’ society. For King the result of such a revolution would be the triple evils of racism, militarism and materialism. Against such a negative revolution of values, King suggested a true revolution of values which would lay hands on the Vietnam war and American colonialism and stop injustice and oppression. Moreover, King considered a genuine revolution of values as ecumenical rather than sectarian and loyal to humanistic values. It is important to recognize that humanism to King is an inspiring project and one demanded by the principles of justice, equality and democracy. For he emphasizes that the demand for equality and democracy goes hand in hand with a great need for moral leadership.

Accordingly, for King a moral leader was someone who knew how to bear the cross, even if he or she was criticized. ‘A cross’, underlined King in his famous speech in 1967 against the Vietnam war, ‘is something that you bear and ultimately that you die on. The cross may mean the death of your popularity. It may mean the death of your bridge to the White House. It may mean the death of a foundation grant…’¹⁷ Not surprisingly, King’s crusade against the war in Vietnam was accompanied by severe criticism against the American press. For many the Riverside Church speech was a strain on the civil rights struggle and a move in favour of Communism. But King was convinced that his anti-Vietnam struggle was part of the basic philosophy of the civil rights movement. King pleaded the cause of an inclusive and compassionate democracy as he had done in the past. He was among the first black leaders to perceive that the struggle for democracy must expand its goals beyond civil rights and as a struggle for justice in the world. As such, fighting against injustice in America was a way to fight for justice everywhere else, including Vietnam.

 

King’s vision of an inclusive democracy, therefore, went hand in hand with a patriotism which has a sense of responsibility and respect in regard to other nations. As he explained: ‘At the heart of all that civilization has meant and developed is ‘community’ – the mutually cooperative and voluntary venture of man to assume a semblance of responsibility for his brother.’¹⁸ That is to say, King’s conception of democracy was best described as total connectedness and a network of reciprocity.

The recognition of one’s indebtedness and one’s responsibility to others led in King’s philosophy to an awareness of the interdependent character of life. King’s conception of an inclusive society did not appear to have room for an individual good that may be opposed to the common good. In other words, the self cannot truly be ignorant of others within its own community. It is interesting to note that King’s notion of inclusiveness is an intercultural imperative rather than a monocultural sense of belonging. King proclaimed: ‘All men are interdependent. Every nation is an heir of a vast treasure of ideas and labour to which both the living and the dead of all nations have contributed.’¹⁹

 

As we can see clearly, King, unlike many of his contemporaries, suggested interconnectedness and intra-cultural dialogue as a moral duty and obligation. He, therefore, criticized white and Negro Americans for their shameless indifference toward the misery of others. For King, ‘If democracy was to win its rightful place in the world, millions of people, Negro and white, must stand before the world as examples of democracy in action, not as voteless victims of the denial and corruption of our heritage.’²⁰

King envisioned democracy as an institution that had to take into consideration the otherness of the other rather than to defeat or humiliate him or her. As such, democracy needed to be a spiritual force, in addition to being just a political mode of organizing society. Therefore, from King’s point of view, democracy, as an institution of moral leadership, was on the side of conviviality and fellowship. But he also knew well that in order for American democracy to be convivial and compassionate, it needed to be empathic toward others, starting with the African Americans and ending with all those who suffer from the consequences of American foreign policy. He invited Americans to think of Jefferson’s warning: ‘I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.’²¹

Martin King came to a profoundly deep understanding of democracy through the struggles and protests for civil rights in America. But he was conscious about the fact that the spirit of democracy could only permeate American society once all white and black Americans would begin to react democratically and inclusively. Such a sacred wish had to be tempered by humility, reconciliation and transcendence. From his very first campaign for equality and civil rights in Montgomery, King stated the end of his struggle as being the beloved community. In a speech given at the University of California at Berkeley on 4 June 1957, King explained: ‘The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of non-violence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community. A boycott is never an end within itself. It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor; but the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption.’²²

 

King’s vision of the ‘beloved community’ brought together the two themes of emancipation and self-transformation. But King was also very attentive to the Gandhian concept of ‘suffering’ as a non-violent mode of resistance against oppression and injustice. To King, suffering was more powerful than violence in persuading an opponent of his/her wrongdoing. He wrote in his Trumpet of Conscience: ‘I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up against our most bitter opponents and say: We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering.’²³

King understood that to be successful, the civil rights movement should be patient and know how to suffer without practising violence. Here, King suggested that the fact of appearing in the American public space without using violence was not necessarily a sign of impotence. Far from being a weakness, King presented selfless suffering as a form of moral superiority. This selfless sacrifice both led to his ability to take many risks in the struggle for civil rights but also tempered his role as the leader of the African American movement in the 1960s and think on a more international level about the practical changes in the world. Once again, King’s own account of his philosophy of direct non-violent action reveals the extent to which he was influenced by Gandhi’s vocabulary and theoretical framework for thinking about civil disobedience and political responsibility, particularly on self-sacrifice and non-possession as a means to attain universal harmony among human communities.

 

According to Gandhi, ‘Those who have followed out this vow of voluntary poverty to the fullest extent possible… testify that when you dispossess yourself of everything you have, you really possess all the treasures of the world.’²⁴ And King would passionately bring the Gandhian principle of moral and spiritual self-transformation into conversation with the challenges of the global world by affirming: ‘The large house in which we live demands that we transform this world-wide neighborhood into a world-wide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools… We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.’²⁵

 

This was King’s way of stating that a beloved community was not only possible at the level of American society but also as a regenerated humanity. King conceived the community in terms of a global brotherhood which would include all nations and all aspects of life. In other words, though King talked about inter-group integration, he thought in terms of intercultural coexistence. In the ‘Newsletter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’ in 1957, shortly after the new civil rights organization had been formed, King described its purpose and goal as follows: ‘The ultimate aim of SCLC is to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality… SCLC works for integration. Our ultimate goal is genuine inter-group and interpersonal living-integration.’²⁶

As in the case of Abraham Lincoln, Martin King believed that the real integration of the blacks in American society would require a change in attitudes rather than just a change of laws. In other words, for King an integrated society was an interrelated and a solidaristic one. He explained this in the last chapter of his book, Where Do We Go from Here? ‘In a real sense, all life is interrelated. The agony of the poor impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor enriches the rich. We are inevitably our brother’s keeper because we are our brother’s brother (…) Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.’²⁷

 

Martin Luther King Jr. had a Hegelian sense of historical consciousness and responsibility that each individual or society had in regard to its zeitgeist. As for King’s own zeitgeist, i.e. the set of ideals and beliefs that motivated his actions and those of his generation, he was quite clear about it, especially when it came to his own duty in the civil rights movement. ‘For almost four years now’, he wrote to his congregation, ‘I have been trying to do as one man, what five or six people ought to be doing… I have come to the conclusion that I can’t stop now. History has thrust upon me a responsibility from which I cannot turn away. I have no choice but to free you now.’²⁸

In his Autobiography, King comes back to this sense of duty and responsibility, though this time not as an individual but at the level of his generation. ‘History has thrust upon our generation an indescribably important destiny – to complete a process of democratization which our nation has too long developed too slowly, but which is our most powerful weapon for world respect and emulation. How we deal with this crucial situation will determine our moral health as individuals, our cultural health as a region, our political health as a nation, and our prestige as a leader of the free world.’²⁹

The fact that Martin Luther King became the ‘established’ leader of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was mainly due to his universalist and humanist attitude that elevated his political philosophy beyond the unique frontiers of black nationalism. As we can see from the above quote, his perennial call had always been for Negro-white unity, integration, reconciliation and finally world peace. As a matter fact, one can say that King universalized the problem of reconciliation by raising it from the sole level of civil rights and black integration in American society to that of what he called the ‘World House’. For Dr. King the final problem for humanity was to learn to survive in the ‘World House’. Once again, as in his speech at the Riverside Church on 4 April 1967, King talked about the idea of moral decline of American society. He wrote: ‘A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral and spiritual bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy.’³⁰

 

Accordingly, King’s view of what he called a World House was dependent on a humanity which can transcend class, ethnic, race and national structures, while replacing spirit of war, violence and power by that of love and non-violence. King’s transvaluation of values represented a path toward the fulfillment of the promise of empathy and compassion in modern society. Here, King signalled his distance from both capitalism and communism. As he said, ‘This revolution of values must go beyond traditional capitalism and communism. …Truth is neither in traditional capitalism nor in classical communism. Each represents a partial truth. Capitalism fails to see the truth in collectivism. Communism fails to see the truth in individualism. Capitalism fails to realize that life is social. Communism fails to realize that life is personal.’³¹

After criticizing both capitalism, for being too individualist, and communism for dismissing individual and personal dimensions of human life, King developed his own normative utopian vision of a good society in Hegelian terms . ‘The good and just society’, he affirmed, ‘is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism.’³²

 

King’s espousal of social democracy was far from Marx’s final moment in the dialectical process of history, where technology frees mankind from the necessities of scarcity. Though King, as an advocate of economic and international egalitarianism, appeared to some of his interpreters as having ‘socialistic’ tendencies,³³ he remained essentially a Christian social radical with strong egalitarian tendencies. At the centre of his vision of community and social justice was the primacy of human dignity. King’s idea of community seemed to be bound with the basic concept of moral and self-determination of the person. Self-determination and community were inseparable in the thought of Dr. King. However, the self was always related to the other, and no one could experience his/her self in total solitude. ‘We are made to live together’, King underlines, ‘because of the interrelated structure of reality.’³⁴

For King, universal human dignity was shared by all individuals. Therefore, disobeying unjust laws and struggle for freedom and integration was for the sake of the dignity of the human personality and the ideal of community. Freedom was not the property of one person. It was a shared value in the human community. This is because freedom for King constituted plurality. It involved, therefore, moral commitment and inter-human relationship. This recognition of human solidarity constituted the essence of the beloved community. If humanity is one, but divided in plural races, religions, languages and ethnics, then the beloved community is also exceptional but plural.

 

Ultimately, for King there was one human community. ‘Thus, it would seem to follow from King’s own perspective that if the realization of community requires the transcendence of racism, it must also entail the transcendence of the system of economic exploitation that gave birth to racism. In short, community requires the transcendence of capitalism and its alienations. King’s critique of capitalism, which some writers think begins only post-Selma actually precedes Montgomery, and proceeds from the same moral principles as does the critique of racism… But after Selma there does seem to be an increasing emphasis on themes of poverty and exploitation, on militarism and imperialism – and on the interrelation of these with each other and with racism. And in his critique of these social evils the concern is always for a community of freedom, and underlying values of dignity, freedom and human solidarity.’³⁵

As such, from King’s perspective, the conception and realization of this community involved a deep moral and spiritual transformation of individual and social values. King’s attack on capitalist values was an appeal to American society and the world to rethink the concept of democracy in relation with a radical redistribution of the economic and political power.

 

In an address to the National Conference for a New Politics in Chicago, in 1967, King insisted: ‘Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of Black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both Black and White, both here and abroad… We must recognize that the problems of neither racial nor economic injustice can be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.’³⁶

King believed that people of will in a larger community should help the black movement in ending segregation and poverty. But he also knew that the transition from a ‘broken community’ to the ‘beloved community’ is not automatic. The beloved community, as King understood it, involved individual and social relationships created by love. This love was completed by a sense of justice, meaning rights for everyone.

In the final analysis, King could not envision democracy apart from the advent of the beloved community, in the same manner that his vision of a ‘blessed’ and ‘holy’ community included achievement of economic justice and colour-blind service activities. Although Dr. King was aware of the fact that the beloved community was unlikely to be established in the immediate future, he continued to believe that its actualization within human history depended on the perpetual struggle of human beings for love and justice.

 

Footnotes:

1. Quoted in Thomas, F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2007, p. 230.

2. James H. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare. Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 1991, p. 65.

3. Ibid., p. 66.

4. Ibid., p. 66.

5. Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper and Row, New York, 1982, p. 78.

6. Quoted in James H. Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America, 1991, op. cit., p. 70.

7. Clayborne Carson (ed.), The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Warner Books, New York, 1998, p. 171.

8. Quoted in Stewart Burns, To the Mountaintop: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Sacred Mission To Save America 1955-1968. Harper-Collins, 2004, p. 223.

9. Clayborne Carson (ed.), The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., op. cit., pp. 222-223.

10. Quoted in Stewart Burns, To the Mountaintop, 2004, op. cit., p. 210.

11. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Beacon Press, Boston, 1967, pp. 76-77.

12. Ibid., p. 77.

13. Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches. (edited by James M. Washington), Harper-Collins, 2003, pp. 317-318.

14. Clayborne Carson, (ed.), The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. op. cit., p. 338.

15. Ibid., p. 345.

16. Ibid., p. 339.

17. Ibid., p. 343.

18. Martin Luther King Jr., ‘The Ethical Demands for Integration’, in A Testament of Hope, 2003, op. cit., p. 122.

19. Ibid.

20. Quoted in Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, 1982, op. cit., p. 129.

21. Quoted in Stewart Burns, To the Mountaintop, 2004, op. cit., p. 351.

22. Martin Luther, King, ‘The Power of Non-violence’, in A Testament of Hope, 2003, op. cit., p. 12.

23. Martin Luther King, The Trumpet of Conscience. Beacon Press, Boston, 2010, pp. 76-77.

24. M.K. Gandhi, From Yeravda Mandir: Navajivan Publishing, Ahmedabad, 1937, p. 25.

25. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here, 1967, op. cit., p. 181.

26. Quoted in Kenneth L. Smith and Ira G. Zepp, Jr., Search for the Beloved Community: The Thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr.. Judson Press, Valley Forge, PA, 1974, p. 120.

27. Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here? 1967, op. cit., pp. 181,190.

28. Quoted in Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound, 1982, op. cit., p. 146.

29. Clayborne Carson (ed.), The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1998, op. cit., p. 100.

30. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here? 1967, op. cit., p. 186.

31. Ibid., pp.186-187.

32. Ibid., p. 187.

33. See Richard A. Jones, ‘Martin Luther King Jr.’s Agape and World House’, in Robert E. Birt (ed.), The Liberatory Thought of Martin Luther King Jr: Critical Essays on the Philosopher King. Lexington Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2012.

34. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience. Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., New York, 1968, p. 69.

35. Robert E. Birt, King’s Radical Vision of Community. https://www.academia.edu/31610171/, p. 7.

36. Quoted in Robert Franklin Mitchell Jr., ‘An Ethic of Hope: The Moral Thought of Martin Luther King, Jr.’, Seminary Quarterly Review 40(4), January 1986, p. 45.