As I write this year’s annual remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr., a “quote” of Dr. King’s has been in the national news. In a 1968 sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Dr. King said: “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.” Instead, the poorly paraphrased “quote” carved into the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial reads, “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”

Maya Angelou has said that the “quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit. . . . The ‘if’ clause that is left out is salient. Leaving it out changes the meaning completely. . . . [It] minimizes the man.” As a result, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has given the National Park Service 30 days to fix the quote.

Words do matter. For this year’s remembrance, I would like to focus on another phrase from Dr. King, one that appropriately and accurately may be found on the memorial’s Inscription Wall:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Dr. King may be best known for using these words in his April 16, 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

While confined in the city jail for his non-violent protests, Dr. King wrote to fellow clergymen who called his activities “unwise and untimely.” Addressing the argument that he was an outside agitator, Dr. King wrote:

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

Thus, in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, Dr. King used these words – “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” – for a purpose. That purpose was to answer a charge commonly raised during the Civil Rights movement – that the people living in the community were content with the social order, that any social strife was due to outside rabble rousers.

But the Letter from the Birmingham Jail was not the first time that Dr. King had used these words. In Stride Toward Freedom: the Montgomery Story, his 1958 book about the Montgomery bus boycott, Dr. King wrote:

The racial issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem. The citizenship rights of Negroes cannot be flouted anywhere without impairing the rights of every other American. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. A breakdown of law in Alabama weakens the very foundations of lawful government in the other forty-seven states. The mere fact that we live in the United States means that we are caught in a network of inescapable mutuality. Therefore, no American can afford to be apathetic about the problem of racial justice. It is a problem that meets every man at his front door. The racial problem will be solved in America to the degree that every American considers himself personally confronted with it. Whether one lives in the heart of the Deep South or on the periphery of the North, the problem of injustice is his problem; it is his problem because it is America’s problem.

Once again, Dr. King used the same words for a purpose – but a somewhat different purpose. At the time of the Montgomery bus boycott, Dr. King was the pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Since he lived in Montgomery, Dr. King did not then face the charge of being an outside agitator. Rather, Dr. King used his phrase for the express purpose of persuading “white Northern liberals” to support what was becoming the Civil Rights movement.

Nor was the Letter from the Birmingham Jail the last time that Dr. King used these words. On July 28, 1967, Dr. King, who that spring had spoken out against the Vietnam War, was interviewed on the television show Face to Face. An audience member asked him why he is spending more time speaking out against the war in Vietnam than raising funds for job training and scholarships for Negroes. Dr. King answered:

I have worked too long now and too hard to get rid of segregation in public accommodations to turn back to the point of segregating my moral concerns. Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And wherever I see injustice, I’m going to take a stand against it whether it’s in Mississippi or in Vietnam.

Dr. King repeated the same words on Veteran’s Day, 1967, when he spoke in Chicago to the National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace on the subject of the domestic impact of the war in Vietnam. He made the same point when he spoke on “The Other America” to Local 1199 of the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees on March 10, 1968 – less than a month before his assassination.

Once again, Dr. King used the same words for a purpose, this time not to defend himself against the accusation that he was an outside agitator nor to seek support in the North for the civil rights struggle in the South but rather to explain why he, a civil rights leader, spoke out against the Vietnam War.

As with many of Dr. King’s most powerful phrases, these words – that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere – can trace their origins back to earlier sources.

In his 1943 book Justice for My People, Ernst Frankenstein wrote:

You can render justice and refuse it. But you cannot render it to some and deny it to others without being fundamentally unjust. This is the decisive test for the future of mankind. You must choose. Justice is indivisible.

In 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoting the Declaration of the International Labor Organization, said, “Poverty anywhere constitutes a danger to prosperity everywhere.”

A 1944 article in The Catholic World stated:

We have heard that peace is indivisible. Say rather that justice is indivisible. Injustice in one respect breeds injustice in other respects. What is done or tolerated in one place will be done or attempted in others.

A 1945 article in the Anglican journal The Churchman stated:

It took us a long time to realize how superbly right Maxim Litvinoff [Soviet foreign minister in the 1930s] was when at Geneva he coined his much-quoted phrase, “Peace is indivisible.” What price shall we now pay before we realize that justice, too, is indivisible, that injustice anywhere must ultimately invalidate justice everywhere?

Could a young Martin Luther King, Jr. have read any of these sources? It is certainly possible, although I know of no record of it. In 1944, when he was only 15 years old, Martin Luther King, Jr. skipped twelfth grade and became a freshman at Morehouse College. By his own account, he began college reading at an eight-grade level.

Perhaps different people each invented similar words for their own rhetorical purposes. Perhaps Martin Luther King, Jr. came across one of these sources during his later studies at Crozer Theological Seminary or Boston University. In a real sense, it does not matter.

Dr. King distilled the phrase to its essence. He employed it powerfully. He made the words his own and bequeathed them to us as his legacy.