Martin Luther King Jr. Speeches: Beyond the dream

Martin Luther King Jr. often is remembered most for his iconic “I Have a Dream” address. But King was a born orator whose words left emotional imprints beyond that hot summer day in August 1963. His sermons continue to reverberate because their themes are as relevant today as they were when King first delivered them. Today, when we reflect on his accomplishments, we share excerpts from three of his lesser-known works.

THE RIGHT TO PROTEST

Dec. 5, 1955 | From King's address to the first Montgomery Improvement Association Meeting, held four days after an African American seamstress named Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man:

"And you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time.

"We are here, we are here this evening because we are tired now.... The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.

"If we were dropped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime, we couldn't do this. But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right."

FREEDOM

April 7, 1957 | "The Birth of a New Nation" speech given at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. King used the struggle of some Africans to rid themselves of British rule to exemplify an innate need for freedom.

"And that seems to be the long story of history. There seems to be a throbbing desire, there seems to be an internal desire for freedom within the soul of every man. And it's there - it might not break forth in the beginning, but eventually it breaks out. Men realize that freedom is something basic, and to rob a man of his freedom is to take from him the essential basis of his manhood. To take from him his freedom is to rob him of something of God's image.... There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom."

SELF-ACCEPTANCE

April 9, 1967 | "The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life," which King delivered at New Covenant Baptist Church in Chicago. King lived by the principle of loving your fellow man, but this speech talked of the need for people to accept themselves.

"I remember when I was in college, I majored in sociology, and all sociology majors had to take a course that was required called statistics. And statistics can be very complicated.... I had a fellow classmate who could just work that stuff out, you know. And he could do his homework in about an hour.... And I was trying to do what he was doing; I was trying to do mine in an hour. And the more I tried to do it in an hour, the more I was flunking out in the course. And I had to come to a very hard conclusion.... "Now, he may be able to do it in an hour, but it takes me two or three hours to do it." I was not willing to accept myself. I was not willing to accept my tools and my limitations.

But you know in life we're called upon to do this. A Ford car trying to be a Cadillac is absurd, but if a Ford will accept itself as a Ford, it can do many things that a Cadillac could never do: it can get in parking spaces that a Cadillac can never get in. And in life some of us are Fords and some of us are Cadillacs. Moses says in "Green Pastures," "Lord, I ain't much, but I is all I got." The principle of self-acceptance is a basic principle in life."