It started as a rougher sermon
King preached “Loving Your Enemies” at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery on 17 November 1957. The King Papers Project has a transcript, and the famous line isn’t in it. From the pulpit he made the point in looser words:
…hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum.
When he revised the sermon for Strength to Love (1963), the idea became the balanced pair of sentences people know now. So date the line to 1963, not 1957.
The 1967 version
Ten years later, speaking to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta on 16 August 1967, he used it again in slightly different words: “Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that” (King Institute). In the same speech he said he had “decided to stick with love.”
What he meant
The sermon is about the hardest commandment in the Gospels, to love your enemies, and King treats it as practical advice. Returning hate only adds more of it, the way adding darkness can’t produce light. See more of his quotes on love.
How to cite it
The page number depends on the edition, so check the copy you’re using.
- MLA: King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Loving Your Enemies.” Strength to Love, Harper & Row, 1963.
- APA: King, M. L., Jr. (1963). Loving your enemies. In Strength to love. Harper & Row.
