"A time comes when silence is betrayal."

ON THE DREAM OF FREEDOM (1963): "So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed . . . that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today. And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true."



"History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

=
They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.


By Rev. Martin Luther King - 4 April 1967 - Speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

Click here to listen to the speech in full - http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article2564.htm

http://www.time.com/time/photoessays/mlk/8.html