“ I know a man, and I just want to talk about him a minute,
and maybe you will discover who I am talking about as I go down the way,
because he was a great one. And he went about serving. He was born in an obscure
village, the child of a poor peasant. And he grew up in still another obscure
village, where he worked as a carpenter until he was 30 years old. The for
three years, he just got on his feet, and was an itinerant preacher. And then
he went about doing some things. He didn’t
have much. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a
family. He never owned a house.; He never went to college. He never visited a
big city. He never went two hundred miles from where he was born. He did none
of the usual things that the world would associate with greatness. He had no
credentials except himself.
He was thirty-three years old when the tide of public opinion
turned against him. They called him a rabble-rouser. They called him a troublemaker.
They said he was an agitator. He practiced civil disobedience; he broke
injunctions. And so he was turned over to his enemies, and went through the
mockery of a trial. And the irony of it all is that his friends turned him over
to them. One of his closest friends denied him. Another of his friends turned
him over to his enemies. And while he
was dying, the people who killed him gambled for his clothing, the only
possession he had in this world. When he was dead, he was buried in a borrowed
tomb, through the pity of a friend…” From: The Drum Major Instinct 1968
Dr.
Martin Luther King
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