“Many Christians have died, but few have died for Christian principles. The belief of Martin Luther King—what an unexpected, peculiar strength it had! His natural mode of address was the sermon. ‘So I say to you, seek God and discover Him and make Him a power in your life. Without Him all our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest nights.’ At the end of his life, King seemed almost in a mystical state, even though politically he had become more radical and there were traces of disillusionment. He had observed that America was a lot sicker than he realized when he began his work. The last, ringing, ‘I have been to the mountain top!’ gave voice to a transcendent experience. It is this visionary strain that makes him a man elusive in the extreme, difficult to understand as a character.”
— Elizabeth Hardwick, writing on Martin Luther King, Jr. in the New York Review of Books, May 9, 1968
