King summoned the bold protest of ancient sources—“Today we particularly need the Hebrew prophets”—whose words had goaded the movement past fear and silence. “They did not believe that conscience is a still, small voice,” he said. “They believed that conscience thunders, or it does not speak at all.” He quoted Amos on justice, Micah on beating swords into plowshares, and Isaiah on what King called an “inescapable obligation” to renounce violence of spirit: “Yea, when you make many prayers/I will not hear/Your hands are full of blood/Wash you, make you clean/Put away the evil off your doings from before mine eyes.”
–Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968, 394
