King continued with this theme to the end of his life. “They kept us in slavery 244 years in this country, and they said they freed us from slavery,” King recalled in a 1968 speech, shortly before he was killed, “but they didn’t give us any land ... And they haven’t given us anything! After making our foreparents work and labor for 244 years — for nothing! Didn’t pay ’em a cent.”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. That’s a beautiful creed,” King told his crowd. It is easy to read such sentences in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and other works by King and leave it at that. But it is vital to read what he said next: “America has never lived up to it.”