I loved Martin Luther King more than a brother.
We had some Stevie Wonder and Luther Vandross, but there’s a lot of hip-hop and other black music that I just never grew up on. My parents didn’t listen to anything other than black gospel.
How can a dream live if we kill it, right? How many Martin Luther King Jr.s, and Malcom Xs, or Barack Obamas have we aborted?
Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.
After marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma as a young man, John Lewis went on to become a legendary leader for civil rights alongside other giants of the movement like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.
I can’t escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.
I feel like I love a little bit of everything. I grew up listening to the stuff my parents liked, from Earth, Wind & Fire, Luther Vandross, Billy Joel to Bruce Springsteen and The Mommas & The Poppas.
We’ve lost leaders from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, Jr. and countless others who have worked to bend the arc of the universe towards justice and equality. Yet, we remain undaunted, dedicated to striving for a fairer, more equal society.
We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail.
I have very purposely never signed up with commercial lecture agencies as most, I think, prominent historical authors do because, to me, that’s a contradiction of who I believe I am given my absorption of the teaching of Martin Luther King, Jr.
I realized that my grandfather walked with Martin Luther King forty years ago. That was his dream. And in his little way, he helped us get closer to where we are today.
By burning Luther’s books you may rid your bookshelves of him, but you will not rid men’s minds of him.
I was raised in Arizona, and I went to public school, and the extent of my knowledge of the civil-rights movement was the story of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. I wonder how much my generation knows.
It’s funny; Luther and I have written many songs together, but we’ve never written songs in the same room.
I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.
Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a revolutionary, simple and plain.
My black hero is and always will be Martin Luther King, not just because of the strength of his oratory but because his vision was very much the reality that I’d come to take for granted.
The greatest lesson I learned that year in Mrs. Henry’s class was the lesson Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to teach us all: Never judge people by the color of their skin. God makes each of us unique in ways that go much deeper.
I get a lot of my inspiration from the Jackson 5 and Luther Vandross.
In 1999, I was in St. Louis with Martin Luther King III as we led protests against the state’s failure to hire minority contractors for highway construction projects. We went at dawn on a summer day with over a thousand people and performed acts of civil disobedience.
I thank those activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and others. They risked – and sometimes lost – their lives in the name of freedom and equality.
I run with music all the time. I cannot run without my iPod. I have everything. Teddy Pendergrass. Luther Van Dross. Michael Jackson. Outkast. If an Usher song comes on and it’s fast, I go fast.
The saddest face I ever saw on Martin Luther King was at the funeral of the four little girls slain in Birmingham, Alabama.
Martin Luther King Jr. really understood the role of the churches when he said, ‘The church is not meant to be the master of the state.’ We don’t sort of take power and grab the levers of government and impose our agenda down people’s throats.
Luther Reigns is a powerhouse.
Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama’s running so we all can fly.
What shaped my politics regarding war and peace was Martin Luther King Jr., the most extraordinary person that I ever heard. And when he began to talk about the issues of war and peace with such eloquence and such passion, I was drawn to that like a magnet.
We talk about how hard it is now. But if we look back at the ’60s, we actually had a president that was assassinated. We had riots, we had Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the FBI, and the Black Panther war. There was so much happening at the time where it felt like America was coming apart at the seams.
One individual can begin a movement that turns the tide of history. Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement, Mohandas Ganhi in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa are examples of people standing up with courage and non-violence to bring about needed changes.
The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.
Playing Martin Luther King Jr. was an honor for me on so many levels. It was the most I’ve ever prepared for a role.
I grew up reading Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
People know my characters like Alice Morgan in ‘Luther’ or Alison Bailey from ‘The Affair.’ For me, that’s a compliment, a kind of joy.
Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered as our prince of peace, of civil rights. We owe him something major that will keep his memory alive.
If we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday at a time of presidential inaugurals, this is thanks to Ronald Reagan who created the holiday, and not to the Democratic Congress of the Carter years, which rejected it.
Since the day Martin Luther King was killed, the black middle classes have almost quadrupled, but the percentage of black children living on or below the poverty line is almost the same.
I want to be like Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and John Lennon… but I want to stay alive.
I can’t ignore what I grew up listening to. My parents used to listen to Michael Jackson non-stop. They used to listen to Luther Vandross, Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder.
Martin Luther King didn’t know he was going to have a day named after him; Muhammad Ali didn’t know he was going to be the people’s champion. He was doing what he was doing because it was right.
I grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood. So going over to friends’ houses for dinner, their parents listened to Al Green and Luther Ingram. It was something that hit me early on, the feeling that came across.
Listen, I’m a proud Democrat. My heroes are the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King. And I don’t apologize for that and never will.
I can only speak for myself, but when I was growing up in Memphis – and having the Martin Luther King holiday and the moment of pause on April 4th – he was just a statue to me. I wanted to make him a little bit more real to me as a human being.
What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays’ Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people… Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie… Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it’s down to us.
In 1974, when I started working with the material that became ‘Horses,’ a lot of our great voices had died. We’d lost Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin, and people like Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.
Just as Jews in the U.S. joined Martin Luther King, I’m sure hundreds of thousands of Jews will join the struggle for civil equality in Israel.
I was in a number of school plays, one in particular, when I was 13 or 14, entitled ‘Illusions.’ It was put together by one of the teachers, and was about famous historical figures. I had to do the Martin Luther King ‘I have a dream’ speech, and some black women in the audience were clapping and crying and whooping.
I admire people who have fought for change: Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln. I’m dead serious when I say that – those are my heroes. I also like Ben Affleck.
Before I came out, there was no such thing as a black conciousness movement. Kids on the street didn’t know who Malcom X or Martin Luther King was until rap let them know.
I have always been a big fan of the BBC program ‘Luther’ with Idris Elba.
Memphis is the place where rock was born and Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed. It’s full of contradictions, abject poverty, and riches that only music can provide.
The rage was in me, and if it wasn’t for the rage, then I wouldn’t know how to be calm. They feed off of each other. Just like when Malcolm X fed off Martin Luther King. They needed each other.
