Martin Luther King Jr.
The Baptist minister who led the American civil rights movement and gave it its most quoted speech before he was assassinated at thirty-nine.
Origin
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) emerged at twenty-six as spokesman for the Montgomery bus boycott. He led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, organized the 1963 March on Washington — where he delivered the 'I Have a Dream' speech — and pressed the Johnson administration into the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). His later turn against the Vietnam War and toward economic justice cost him support. James Earl Ray shot him on the Lorraine Motel balcony in Memphis on April 4, 1968. He was thirty-nine.
Modern usage
'I have a dream' is the most quoted line in American political oratory of the 20th century. 'The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice' is the second most quoted; his version was a paraphrase of an older abolitionist line. 'Content of their character' is the conservative quotation; 'unearned suffering is redemptive' is the activist one. Different camps quote a different King.
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