In a speech delivered in Nashville, Tennessee, on 27 December 1962, the orator, civil-rights leader and essayist Martin Luther King presented an eloquent defence of his philosophy of racial integration, as distinct from the legal and social processes of desegregation:

For King, therefore, time, or the clock of destiny, was to be measured against the urgent need to establish integration amongst blacks and whites, a condition necessary to what he perceived as ‘a recognition of the fact that a denial of freedom to an individual is a denial of life itself': ‘I may do well in a desegregated society but I can never know what my total capacity is until I live in an integrated society. I cannot be free until I have had the opportunity to fulfil my total capacity untrammeled [sic] by any artificial hindrance or barrier.’ King's demand for racial integration strategically acknowledged both the ‘solidarity of the human family’ and the pursuit of freedom as a fundamental prerequisite for choice, determination and responsibility. King defined the Civil Rights March on Washington in August 1963 as the ‘greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation’.