Martin Luther King Jr.

Oberlin College, June 14, 1965, "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" Martin Luther King Jr. builds the whole address on Rip Van Winkle, pointing out that the remarkable thing is not that Rip slept 20 years but that he "slept through a revolution." The image is simple enough to remember for life and pointed enough to sting: the danger for comfortable graduates was not opposing change but failing to notice it. He also returns to two of his great lines, that all of us are "tied in a single garment of destiny," and that we must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools. For anyone starting out, it is a warning about drifting through history.