Towards the end of his life, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reflected on the Black Civil Rights struggle, the successes, and the long road ahead. In his final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community, he wrote,
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"And so being a Negro in America is not a comfortable existence.
It means being a part of the company of the bruised, the battered, the scarred, and the defeated. Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry.
It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death.
It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies.
It means having your legs cut off and then being condemned for being a cripple.
It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitations, and then being hated for being an orphan.
Being a Negro in America means listening to suburban politicians talk eloquently against open housing while arguing in the same breath that they are not racists.
It means being harried by day and haunted by night by a nagging sense of nobodyness and constantly fighting to be saved from the poison of bitterness.
It means the ache and anguish of living in so many situations where hopes unborn have died.
...It is enough to cause the Negro to give up in despair.
And yet there are times when life demands the perpetual doing of the impossible. The life of our slave forebears is eternal testimony to the ability of men to achieve the impossible. So, too, we must embark upon this difficult, trying, and sometimes bewildering course. With a dynamic will, we must transform our minus into a plus and move on aggressively through the storms of injustice and the jostling winds of daily handicaps, toward the beaconing lights of fulfillment.
Our dilemma is serious, and our handicaps are real. But equally real is the power of a creative will and its ability to give us the courage to on 'in spite of.'"
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