"[W]hy are there no Martin Luther Kings around today? I think one reason is that there are no black leaders willing to resist the seductions of racial power, or to make the sacrifices moral power requires. King understood that racial power subverts moral power, and he pushed the principles of fairness and equality rather than black power because he believed those principles would bring blacks their most complete liberation. He sacrificed race for morality, and his innocence was made genuine by that sacrifice. What made King the most powerful and extraordinary black leader of this century was not his race but his morality."
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Academics from the United StatesColumnists from the United StatesAfrican AmericansPeople from ChicagoSociologists from the United States
Original Language: English
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The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America (1991), p. 19
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Shelby_Steele
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Shelby Steele
Shelby Steele (born 1 January 1946) is an American conservative writer and a fellow of the Hoover Institution. His columns and op-eds have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Harper's Magazine. In 1991 he won an Emmy, a Writers Guild award, and a San Francisco Film Festival award for his documentary, Seven Days in Bensonhurst. In 2004 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.
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