Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was, as we know, a member of the clergy. He was a reverend. As such, he was more than a little conversant with scripture. When, on April 10, 1960, he addressed the assembled students, faculty and visitors on the Atlanta campus of Spelman College, he was there to enlist his audience in a crusade, specifically, a crusade for social justice. Despite major advances in the struggle for civil rights, blacks continued to suffer the indignities of racism, especially across the American South. By the time he had been invited to address the students of Spelman College, he had already devoted considerable energy toward affecting meaningful change through peaceable means with respect to equal rights for all ethnicities. The landmark Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954 represented enormous legal progress, but social progress lagged far behind. The struggle, King recognized, was a marathon, not a sprint. In appealing to those students that April day, he referenced a relevant passage from the Book of Isaiah: “They will stretch out their wings like eagles. They will run and not become weary, they will walk and not get tired.” This Biblical passage alludes to the determination necessary to see protracted struggles through to their completion, all the while overcoming whatever obstacles fate throws in one’s way. In King’s context, however, this passage was intended to mean more: It was intended to engage tomorrow’s leaders in a long struggle and, as importantly, to keep them engaged.

“Life for none of us has been a crystal stair, but there is something we can learn from the broken grammar of that mother, that we must keep moving. If you can’t fly, run; if you can’t run, walk; if you can’t walk, crawl; but by all means keep moving.”

The Reverend King understood very well that the struggle for civil rights required breaking down social and cultural barriers that had been fortified over the course of centuries.