Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Social Change Remarks at a White House Reception tot Friends of the Center.

It's a great honor for me to welcome my good friends to the White House this evening and an honor to be joined by my special friends on this program.

The Morehouse College Choir, which you've all heard with great pleasure, is memorable in itself. Martin Luther King, Jr., sang in it. Is that right, Coretta? And Martin Luther King II is now studying at Morehouse. I happen to be a Morehouse brother myself. And the choir sang on a special day for me, the day of my Inauguration. So, I'm very deeply grateful to them and moved whenever I hear them.

I'm also proud of my friend, Daddy King. He is, I think, described pretty well—if you will forgive my saying so-as St. Paul instructed us. He has borne all things, he's believed all things, hoped all things; his love never failing, his spirit triumphant, his voice still strong in the praise of the Lord, whom he has served all his days.

I'm also grateful that Henry Ford II has come. His family's charities, often without public knowledge or recognition, have sustained many of those in this group and those who are loved by others in this group, when projects were looked on as social experiments, experiments that have changed our society. And I think that Henry Ford himself has been a great bridge between those who've been blessed with material wealth and those who have suffered from poverty and injustice. And I want to express my thanks, as President, to you and what you and your family have meant and still mean to our country.

I'm glad to see my friend Andy Young here. He was at the side of Martin Luther King, Jr., during most of his ministry. He was with him at the time of his death. As our Ambassador to the United Nations, Andy Young accurately represents the principles that were the foundation of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life. And he has put forward our own Nation in its best posture, depending on understanding, brotherhood, love, compassion, nonviolence, in the most effective possible way.

And I would like to mention Coretta King, who out of her own personal grief was strengthened and not weakened, who assumed the position of leadership, and who is trying now to share the dreams of her husband with the rest of us and, indeed, with the whole world in creating an international center to nurture the great change which he fought for, prayed for, and died for.

We are here today to remember Martin Luther King, Jr., and what he stood for and what his accomplishments were. He brought together the conscience of white Americans and the courage of black Americans in a bond of love that broke down the barriers that had existed for centuries. He helped us to overcome our ignorance of one another and our fear of doing what many of us knew was right. In a period of great hostility and difficult social change, when many compromised too much and others compromised not enough, he walked a steady path of conviction. And our people, both black and white, sooner or later learned to follow in his footsteps.

He was not alone in calling on, working for, sacrificing for the changes that he sought, so that more than anything else his own voice and the voice of his people could be heard throughout this Nation, throughout the world, and we're all better for it.

Since the time of Christ, so far as I know, there have been two major nonviolent revolutions. The first one freed India from outside domination, when a quiet little man walked the dusty roads and preached the principle of nonviolence and human love. And the other, led by Dr. King, freed the United States, the country which we all love, from the domination of racism and prejudice.

I'm grateful that the power of these revolutions did not die with the men who led them, who gave such eloquent expression to their goals and to their methods. Unlike violent revolutions, the power of nonviolence lives on. It does not depend on the ability to accumulate weapons and arms. It does not depend on hatred to perpetuate it. It does not depend on terror or maiming or suffering or death, It's available not just to the strong and domineering and the eloquent, but it's also available to the poor and the meek and those who are often inarticulate or even ignorant. Nonviolence is effective among the young and not just the old.

I think this is why our traditional national structures have been changed for the better. And certainly in my lifetime, perhaps even in the entire history of our country, there's not been a change so profound, no one that was so greatly needed, no one that's been consummated with such uniform benefits for all—those who espoused the change originally, those who fought it bitterly until it was obvious that it was inevitable.

This kind of commitment depends on the strength of convictions. It depends on the capacity to love. It depends on an ability to accept blows and suffering and not to return them. It depends on loving through to a victory that transcends that kind of victory that can be won by force, because it involves, as Christ taught, a victory brought about by changing the hearts of people who were enemies.

It's ever more important if we are to gain full human rights around the world for us to set an example of freedom from threat and torture, of freedom from disease and hunger, of freedom of ideas for all people without requiring that people be sacrificed for the worthy causes that they espouse.

That's what makes the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Social Change so important. It's the primary repository for the documents and films and photographs, verbal statements of those who brought about the civil rights movement.

Quite often I have leaders come to visit me as their first stop, and their second stop is in Atlanta to think back and to pay tribute to a man who served our Nation, who served me, who served all Americans so well.

Of course, we've not overcome all the injustices and inequities that he and others set out to change and to make right. But we've passed many a milestone already along that difficult road.

I said last year, in honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., with the highest civilian honor that I, as President, can bestow, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, that he made our Nation stronger because he made us better. And tonight I'd like to add that he made our world better because he made our Nation stronger.

We are better able to stand the assaults and attacks and criticisms of those who would deny freedom and justice everywhere, maybe able to hold fast, sometimes turning the other cheek to abuse, but with our feet willing only to move forward, not backward, until at last we all overcome together.

Thank you very much.