King and Longfellow: The Power of Words

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s courage, vision, and powerful words enabled him to lead a movement which changed the course of history. His speeches are full of literary and biblical references. Unsurprisingly, many of his allusions were drawn from 19th-century New England, a time and place in which American Literature grew alongside abolitionist agitation. King was influenced by Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, Theodore Parker’s abolitionist sermons, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s life and poetry.

Like Longfellow, King was aware of the power of a well-crafted turn of phrase. Drawing on these 19th-century sources, he adapted their words and ideas for his cause and his modern time. He borrowed an extended metaphor from an 1853 sermon by Parker:

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.

King shaped the metaphor into the elegant, memorable, and quotable phrase “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

In a speech given in 1967 at Glenville High School in Ohio, King references and builds on Longfellow's "The Ladder of St. Augustine" from 1858, saying, "It was Longfellow who said, 'The heights of great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept were toiling upward in the night.' And I urge you today to realize that doors of opportunities are opening now that were not open to our mothers and our fathers. And the great challenge facing each of you today is to be ready to enter these doors as they open."

The outline for the sermon "Unfulfilled Hopes" from April 1959 shows that King was not only aware of Longfellow's work, but his life as well:

We read Longfellow as he translates Dante. We think of his greatness, the poet translating the works of another great poet. Then, we appreciate Longfellow even more when we discover that a few days before he started translating Dante, the dress of his wife accidentally caught fire. And he tried desperately to put the fire out, but he couldn't put it out. It injured her to the point that she died a few days later. Here we see that wifeless, motherless man sitting in his lonely room, turning to the translation of Dante in order to bring meaning in life. And he did it well.

In Longfellow’s 1839 novel, Hyperion: A Romance, the main character Paul Flemming is told by a travelling companion, "I shall not see you in the morning; so good bye, and God bless you. Remember my parting words. Never mind trifles. In this world a man must either be anvil or hammer. Care killed a cat!" With the anvil or hammer metaphor, Longfellow echoed one of his literary heroes, Johann Wolfgang Goethe.

King echoed the words in his sermon "Transformed Nonconformist" first written in 1954 and reworked in 1962-3, writing, "...every man is a hammer or an anvil, that is to say that every man either molds society or is molded by society." Not long before his assassination, King gave a speech to the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They were preparing for a new campaign that spring and King gave an assessment of where the movement then stood and where he saw it going. In that speech he returned to the hammer and anvil image:

Violence has been the inseparable twin of materialism—the hallmark of its grandeur. This is the one thing about modern civilization that I do not want to imitate. Humanity is waiting for something other than a blind imitation of the past. If we want truly to advance a step further, if we want to turn over the new leaf and really set a new man afoot, we must begin to turn mankind away from the long and desolate night of violence. May it not be that the new man the world needs is the non-violent man? Longfellow said: "In this world a man must either be an anvil or the hammer." We must be hammers shaping a new society rather than anvils molded by the old. This not only will make us new men but will give us a new kind of power. It will not be Lord Acton's image of power that tends to corrupt, the absolute power that corrupts absolutely. It will be power infused with love and justice that will change dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. I must say to each of you that I have made my decision.

Among other things today, we should remember the power of words to inspire and move people to great actions.