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Civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said a great many quotable things, but words have also been attributed to him that were not his own. It was not really King who said, for example, I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy, but rather a Facebook user whose prefatory remarks were conflated with King's when her post was copied and pasted and went viral. Nor did King actually say or write the line, I was a drum major for justice, peace, and righteousness, though those exact words were inscribed on a statue of MLK erected in Washington, D.C., in 2011. It was was an ill-considered paraphrase of a deeper thought King had uttered two months before he was assassinated in 1968: The shortened version made King look like an arrogant twit, poet Maya Angelou complained. Others agreed. Ultimately, the wording was removed from the statue. Similarly, King never uttered the statement, Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter, though it is abundantly cited as such every year on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: But while the exact quote is nowhere to be found in King's speeches or writings, it does seem to be a paraphrase of a more complex thought he uttered during a sermon in Selma, Alabama, on 8 March 1965, the day after Bloody Sunday, on which civil rights protesters were attacked and beaten by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge: Albeit shortened, reworded, and deprived of context, the viral passage captures an essential point King was trying to make, but it is more accurately represented as a paraphrase, not a direct quote.
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