“You started out right. You wrote in your Declaration of
Independence that ‘all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness.’
But, America, you strayed away from that sublime principle.
You left the house of your great heritage and strayed away into a far country
of segregation and discrimination. You have trampled over sixteen million of
your brothers. You have deprived them of the basic goods of life. You have
taken from them their self-respect and their sense of dignity. You have treated
them as if they were things rather than persons. Because of this a famine has
broken out in your land.
In the midst of all your spiritual wealth, you are
spiritually and morally poverty-stricken, unable to speak to the conscience of
this world. America, in this famine situation, if you will come to yourself and
rise up and decide to come back home, I will take you in, for you are made for
something high and something noble and something good.”
“The Measure of a Man,” Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.