Historian Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, concluded his speech by quoting King's own words about the ultimate question of identity. King reflected that if you have never found something so precious that you would die for it, then you aren't fit to live. He described how a person might refuse to take a stand out of fear, living to ninety but being just as dead at thirty-eight, with the cessation of breathing merely a belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. Carson used this powerful passage to urge graduates to find their own deeply held convictions. King's words promised that standing for what is right, even when criticized and misunderstood, is never a lonely act, because God has a way of transforming a minority into a majority.