If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and Earth will have to pause and say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.'
Martin Luther King Jr.
Morehouse College Commencement 1959, 1959
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King tells the graduates that whatever they do, they must do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better. He doesn't just say 'work hard' — he makes a specific, radical claim: dignity comes not from the prestige of the work but from the excellence brought to it. If you're called to sweep streets, sweep them with the devotion of a Renaissance master. This passage, one of the most quoted in King's entire body of work, reflects his deep conviction that the civil rights struggle was not only about political equality but about the inherent worth of every human being and every form of honest labor. At Morehouse, a college founded to educate Black men, the message lands with particular force: no one can diminish you if you refuse to do less than your best.
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