I’ve seen the following meme passed around on Facebook in recent days, generally in response to the protests in Ferguson. I think that the quote lacks context.

The meme, in case you can’t see the image, it quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. as follows:

Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

A common tactic to discredit a movement is to point to illegal acts of some people and associate that with the entire group. That way, people start to see nothing but violence in months of peaceful protests with only sporadic violence by some people, combined with people’s reactions to a grossly disproportionate police response (and I don’t think that ought to be a controversial characterization of the situation in Ferguson from August until a few days ago, but others may disagree).

I think it’s important to look at the MLK quote in its broader context. He drew a considerable amount of inspiration from Gandhi, who for all of his virtues had an almost comically naive view of how people should have responded to Germany in WWII. That said, nonviolence is a strategy that is much more complex than just saying “don’t be violent.” Without expressly defending certain things that may have happened on the protesters’ side in the past few months, I will say that history reveals again and again that you can only push people so much before they start to push back, and people in Ferguson have been pushed quite a bit. Now, getting back to the MLK quote, here’s a larger section from the speech (his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964):

What the main sections of the civil rights movement in the United States are saying is that the demand for dignity, equality, jobs, and citizenship will not be abandoned or diluted or postponed. If that means resistance and conflict we shall not flinch. We shall not be cowed. We are no longer afraid.

The word that symbolizes the spirit and the outward form of our encounter is nonviolence, and it is doubtless that factor which made it seem appropriate to award a peace prize to one identified with struggle. Broadly speaking, nonviolence in the civil rights struggle has meant not relying on arms and weapons of struggle. It has meant noncooperation with customs and laws which are institutional aspects of a regime of discrimination and enslavement. It has meant direct participation of masses in protest, rather than reliance on indirect methods which frequently do not involve masses in action at all.

Nonviolence has also meant that my people in the agonizing struggles of recent years have taken suffering upon themselves instead of inflicting it on others. It has meant, as I said, that we are no longer afraid and cowed. But in some substantial degree it has meant that we do not want to instill fear in others or into the society of which we are a part. The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites. It seeks no victory over anyone. It seeks to liberate American society and to share in the self-liberation of all the people.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

In a real sense nonviolence seeks to redeem the spiritual and moral lag that I spoke of earlier as the chief dilemma of modern man. It seeks to secure moral ends through moral means. Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. Indeed, it is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.

I believe in this method because I think it is the only way to reestablish a broken community. It is the method which seeks to implement the just law by appealing to the conscience of the great decent majority who through blindness, fear, pride, and irrationality have allowed their consciences to sleep.

The nonviolent resisters can summarize their message in the following simple terms: we will take direct action against injustice despite the failure of governmental and other official agencies to act first. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts. We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise, but we are ready to suffer when necessary and even risk our lives to become witnesses to truth as we see it.

[Emphasis added.]

UPDATE (11/27/2014): See also “Whites Dehumanize Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Into A Trope To Silence Black People” at Gradient Lair:

MLK is regularly evoked by Whites in a dehumanizing fashion in order to police Black vernacular (subversion/reclamation), police Black people’s response to continued State violence and anti-Blackness, and to control Black culture and life via the myth that the politics of respectability can “earn” us humanity; humanity denied us as the very foundation and current reality of this country, in fact.

It is triggering, erasure, abusive, ahistorical and violent to remind Black people practically on the hour of the coordinated State violence (abuse, arrests, physical violence, FBI intimidation, surveillance/COINTELPRO, psychological warfare and eventually assassination) on MLK and other Black activists/ordinary Black citizens, and then suggest that us behaving like a White-washed version of MLK (one erasing his work and humanly flaws and replacing it with appeasing Whiteness and empty deification) now will “protect” us from the same State violence that Black people have always faced. (MLK’s “non-violent” actions were still classified as “extremist.”) Whites, who benefit from racism, think it is acceptable to tell Black people to “behave” like MLK, when he was murdered for the same reasons that we have to fight today.

[Emphasis in original.]

UPDATE (11/30/14): See also also “‘But MLK said…’ STAHP!” by Feminace:

Can the people posting MLK quotes in order to make the protests/revolt in Ferguson seem against the man’s wishes just fucking stop?

There are many reasons, but here are a few that immediately come to mind:

A) The man’s memory isn’t a fucking clicker you can whip out to make us ‘animals’ behave.
B) He did great things, but he’s not the Black Messiah. We don’t pray to him, we don’t pray towards him, we don’t burn incense for him, we don’t sing MLK carols, stop treating his memory like an invisible sheep herder you can invoke to keep the ‘animals’ in line.
C) Some of you seem very willing to cut off your memory of the man right before and after the I Have A Dream Speech. He may have used polite words, but his message was far from it. Read Letters from a Birmingham Prison. Read the speeches he gave around the too tragic end of his life.
D)He did almost everything right according to the Respectability Police: was well educated, dressed well, spoke well, promoted peaceful protest – and got shot in the fucking head for it anyway. It’s not the presentation, it’s the message.
E) He was treated as an enemy of the state by the FBI, a branch of the same government you insist we meekly submit to when they repeatedly make it clear that our lives don’t matter.
F) You wanna duel quotes? Look this one up: “A riot is the language of the unheard“. Guess who said that? You may also want to read the rest of what he said before and after that too.

[Emphasis in original.]