His deeds and words transformed a nation

The grandson and son of a preacher who became a preacher himself, Martin Luther King Jr. could propel congregations to their feet with the rolling, cascading meter of his speeches, demanding that blacks be given rights too long denied by an America falling too short of its ideals.

Yet, he also could appeal to the intellect, explaining patiently why "Negroes" could no longer be patient, why a people who had endured slavery, and lynchings, and segregation, and disenfranchisement had said "enough."

More than 40 years after his death by an assassin's bullet, it is sometimes jarring to recall how much the Rev. King had accomplished before his 40th birthday: He'd finished high school at age 15, college by 19. He was a loving husband and father to two daughters and two sons.

In his mid-20s, he led a successful bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., to desegregate the transit system there. In 1964 he became the youngest man to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He gave more than 2,500 speeches, was arrested more than 20 times, assaulted at least four times and endured hundreds of death threats.

Many of us know his famous remarks, especially from the "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963 at the March on Washington. But his other speeches, writings, letters and books provide a fuller picture of a man whose life - in word and deed - transformed this nation.

We have published some of these comments before. May they inspire us today and in the future, as King did during his life.

An address at Holt Street Baptist Church, December 1955, at the start of the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott:

"If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to Earth.... And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream."

In Washington, D.C., May 1957:

"Move on with dignity and honor and respectability.

"I realize that it will cause restless nights sometime. It might cause losing a job; it will cause suffering and sacrifice. It might even cause physical death for some. But if physical death is the price that some must pay to free their children from a permanent life of psychological death, then nothing can be more Christian."

At Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Ala., November 1957:

"We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates.... You can't see straight when you hate. You can't walk straight when you hate. You can't stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. He comes to the point that he becomes a pathological case."

Quoted in The Wall Street Journal, November 1962:

"It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important."

Letter from the Birmingham Jail, April 1963, in response to a statement by eight clergymen in Alabama:

"Perhaps it's easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, 'Wait.' But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters;... [W]hen you [are] forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness,' then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."

At a mass march in Detroit, June 1963:

"If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live."

Eulogy for the young girls of the Birmingham, Ala., church bombing, September 1963:

"[These girls] have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of Southern Dixiecrats and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing Northern Republicans. They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice."

Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, Oslo, Norway, December 1964:

"I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality."

Address at Riverside Church, New York City, April 1967:

"Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read 'Vietnam.' "