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MLK speech "Life's Blueprint"

Last updated over 4 years ago
7 questions
Six months before he was assassinated, King spoke to a group of students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967.
As you read think about Why he wrote this speech AND What is the message
I want to ask you a question, and that is: What is your life’s blueprint?
Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint, and that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, and a building is not well erected without a good, solid blueprint.
Now each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives, and the question is whether you have a proper, a solid and a sound blueprint.
I want to suggest some of the things that should begin your life’s blueprint.
Number one in your life’s blueprint, should be a deep belief in your own dignity, your worth and your own somebodiness.
Don’t allow anybody to make you feel that you’re nobody.
Always feel that you count.
Always feel that you have worth,
and always feel that your life has ultimate significance.
1

What do you think somebodiness means?

Secondly, in your life’s blueprint you must have as the basic principle the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor.
You’re going to be deciding as the days, as the years unfold what you will do in life — what your life’s work will be.
Set out to do it well.
And I say to you, my young friends, doors are opening to you–doors of opportunities that were not open to your mothers and your fathers — and the great challenge facing you is to be ready to face these doors as they open.
1

What is determination AND why is it important?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great essayist, said in a lecture in 1871, “If a man can write a better book or preach a better sermon or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, even if he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”
This hasn’t always been true — but it will become increasingly true, and so I would urge you to study hard, to burn the midnight oil; I would say to you, don’t drop out of school. I understand all the sociological reasons, but I urge you that in spite of your economic plight, in spite of the situation that you’re forced to live in — stay in school.
1

What do you think the idiom "burn the midnight oil" means?

And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it, don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.
If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.
If you can’t be a pine at the top of the hill, be a shrub in the valley. Be be the best little shrub on the side of the hill. Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.If you can’t be a highway, just be a trail. If you can’t be a sun, be a star. For it isn’t by size that you win or fail.
Be the best of whatever you are.
And finally, in your life’s blueprint must be a commitment to the eternal principles of beauty, love, and justice. Don’t allow anybody to pull you so low as to make you hate them.
Don’t allow anybody to cause you to lose your self-respect to the point that you do not struggle for justice. However young you are, you have a responsibility to seek to make your nation a better nation in which to live.
You have a responsibility to seek to make life better for everybody. And so you must be involved in the struggle for freedom and justice.
1

What is commitment AND why is it important?

1

What is MLK asking the students at Barrett Junior High to do?

1

WHY did Martin Luther King Jr. give this speech?

1

WHAT is the message of this speech?