Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Birth of a New Nation,"
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, April 7, 1957.
That’s the long story of freedom, isn’t it? Before you get to Canaan, you’ve got a Red Sea to confront. You have a hardened heart of a pharaoh to confront. You have the prodigious hilltops of evil in the wilderness to confront. And even when you get up to the Promised Land, you have giants in the land. The beautiful thing about it is that there are a few people who’ve been over in the land. They have spied enough to say, “Even though the giants are there we can possess the land, because we got the internal fiber to stand up amid anything that we have to face.”
The road to freedom is a difficult, hard road. It always makes for temporary setbacks. And those people who tell you today that there is more tension in Montgomery than there has ever been are telling you right. Whenever you get out of Egypt, you always confront a little tension, you always confront a little temporary setback. If you didn’t confront that you’d never get out. You must remember that the tension-less period that we like to think of was the period when the Negro was complacently adjusted to segregation, discrimination, insult, and exploitation. And the period of tension is the period when the Negro has decided to rise up and break aloose from that. And this is the peace that we are seeking: not an old negative obnoxious peace which is merely the absence of tension, but a positive, lasting peace, which is the presence of brotherhood and justice. And it is never brought about without this temporary period of tension.

Carson, Clayborne; Shepard, Kris. A Call to Conscience (pp. 34-35). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Birth of a New Nation," (Continued)
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, April 7, 1957.
But something else came to my mind. God comes in the picture even when the Church won’t take a stand. God has injected a principle in this universe. God has said that all men must respect the dignity and worth of all human personality, “And if you don’t do that, I will take charge.” It seems this morning that I can hear God speaking. I can hear Him speaking throughout the universe, saying, “Be still and know that I am God. And if you don’t stop, if you don’t straighten up, if you don’t stop exploiting people, I’m going to rise up and break the backbone of your power. And your power will be no more!” And the power of Great Britain is no more. I looked at France. I looked at Britain. And I thought about the Britain that could boast, “The sun never sets on our great Empire.” And I said now she had gone to the level that the sun hardly rises on the British Empire. Because it was based on exploitation. Because the God of the universe eventually takes a stand. And I say to you this morning, my friends, rise up and know that, as you struggle for justice, you do not struggle alone. But God struggles with you. And He is working every day.
Carson, Clayborne; Shepard, Kris. A Call to Conscience (p. 38-39). Grand Central Publishing. Kindle Edition.

This episode seems shocking. What a comedown! Only three days ear­lier they had reached the highest peak of prophetic and spiritual exalta­tion, and now they complain about such a prosaic and unspiritual item as water. . . . The Negroes of America behave just like the children of Israel. Only in 1963 they experienced the miracle of having turned the tide of history, the joy of finding millions of Americans involved in the struggle for civil rights, the exaltation of the fellowship, the March to Washington. Now only a few months later they have the audacity to murmur: “What shall we drink? We want adequate education, decent housing, proper employment.” How ordinary, how unpoetic, how annoying! . . . We are ready to applaud dramatic struggles once a year in Washington. For the sake of lofty principles we will spend a day or two in jail somewhere in Alabama. . . . The tragedy of Pharaoh was the failure to realize that the exodus from slavery could have spelled redemption for both Israel and Egypt. Would that Pharaoh and the Egyptians had joined the Israelites in the desert and together stood at the foot of Sinai!
Abraham J. Heschel, “Religion and Race,” in The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), p. 85.
Quoted by Susannah Heschel in:
"Theological Affinities in the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr."
Susannah Heschel
Conservative Judaism, Vol. 50 No. 2-3, 1998.

Heschel developed a theology of what he termed “divine pathos” that he claimed was rooted in the teachings of the biblical prophets. In the experi­ence of the prophets, God was not remote, nor simply a commanding force that expects obedience. Rather, God responds to human beings “in an inti­mate and subjective manner,” experiencing “joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath.” Humanity and God do not inhabit detached realms, because God “has a stake in the human situation. . . . Man is not only an image of God; he is a perpetual concern of God.” Central to the prophets is the conviction that “the attitudes of man may affect the life of God, that God stands in an intimate relationship to the world.” (S. Heschel is quoting A. J. Heschel's The Prophets)
....
The pathos of God is not described or argued by King in the same language that Heschel uses, but is invoked in the images of his lan­guage. Indeed, essential to the power of King’s words is the implication that God has compassion for human beings and is sympathetic to human suffer­ing. During the Montgomery boycott, he declared, “God is using Mont­gomery as His proving ground,” assuring his followers, “Remember, if I am stopped, this movement will not stop because God is with the movement.” Later, in 1968, he said, “It is possible for me to falter, but I am profoundly secure in my knowledge that God loves us; He has not worked out a design for our failure.” God’s involvement in the struggle was an important compo­nent in solidifying the identity of the movement with biblical Heilsgeschichte.
"Theological Affinities in the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr."
Susannah Heschel
Conservative Judaism, Vol. 50 No. 2-3, 1998. pgs. 136-137