It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'
Interpretation
The quote highlights the broken promises of equality and justice for African Americans in the United States.
In this powerful statement, Martin Luther King, Jr. articulates the systemic failures of America to deliver on its promises of freedom and equity to its citizens of color. He uses the metaphor of a promissory note to illustrate how the nation has not fulfilled its obligation to provide the same rights and opportunities to all its citizens, drawing attention to the ongoing injustices faced by the Black community.
In practice
In a speech about social justice, one might reference this quote to emphasize the ongoing struggle for equality.
This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love.
Music is the best consolation for a despaired man
We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.
We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
Israel... is one of the great outpost of democracy in the world
One of the greatest casualties of the war in Vietnam is the Great Society... shot down on the battlefield of Vietnam.
I'm here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn't make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.
Public money ought to be touched with the most scrupulous conscientiousness of honor. It is not the produce of riches only, but of the hard earnings of labor and poverty. It is drawn even from the bitterness of want and misery. Not a beggar passes, or perishes in the streets, whose mite is not in that mass.
The worthy GM never purposely kills players' PCs, He presents opportunities for the rash and unthinking players to do that all on their own.
There is more than one kind of freedom," said Aunt Lydia. "Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it.
A truth that is merely handed on, without being thought anew from its very foundations, has lost its vital power.
I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.
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