Once plagued with a tragic sense of inferiority resulting from the crippling effects of slavery and segregation, the Negro has now been driven to re-evaluate himself. He has come to feel that he is somebody. His religion reveals to him that God loves all his children and the important thing about man is not "his specificity but his fundamentum, not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but his eternal worth to God.
“If no other doctrine or creed spoke definitely to the question of human identity, the idea of existing as a ‘child of God’ made in the ‘image of God’ certainly did.”
- Richard W. Wills Sr., Martin Luther King Jr. and the Image of God, p. 117.