Daily Inspiration Quote by Martin Luther King Jr.

King’s sentence is built like a courtroom admission that flips into an indictment. He concedes the obvious - yes, Black people commit crimes - then immediately refuses the lazy conclusion that criminality is a racial essence. “Incontestable and deplorable” borrows the language of sober moral accounting, disarming the listener who expects evasion. The pivot arrives with “but”: the crimes are “derivative,” not originating. King reframes street-level violence and theft as downstream symptoms, produced by upstream choices made by a dominant society.

The subtext is aimed at a white moderate audience tempted by law-and-order comfort. King anticipates the rhetorical trap: if you acknowledge Black crime, you’re expected to endorse harsher policing and moralizing lectures. He uses that acknowledgement instead to widen the frame from individual blame to structural causation - segregation, job exclusion, housing discrimination, underfunded schools, and the daily humiliations that corrode civic belonging. “Born of” is the key metaphor: crime is not excused, but explained as a social product, gestated in conditions whites largely engineered and maintained.

Contextually, this sits in King’s late-career shift toward naming Northern racism, economic exploitation, and the violence embedded in “respectable” institutions. It also answers the era’s backlash against civil rights gains: when the country used images of riots and crime to delegitimize Black demands, King insisted that order without justice is just a quieter kind of brutality. The line’s intent isn’t to absolve; it’s to relocate responsibility to where power actually lives.