I want to ask you a question and that is what is in your life's blueprint. This is the most important and crucial period of your lives for what you do now and what you decide now at this age, may well determine which way your life shall go.

And whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an Architect who draws a blueprint, and that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, as the model for those who are to build the building, and the building is not well erected without a good sound and solid blueprint.

Now each of you is in the process of building the structure of your lives and the question is whether you have a proper, a solid and a sound blueprint. And I wanna suggest some of the things that should be in your life's blueprint:

Number 1 - in your life's blueprint should be, a deep belief in your own dignity, your own worth and your own somebodiness. Don't allow anybody to make you feel that you are nobody, always feel that you count always feel that you have worth, and always feel that your life has the ultimate significance.

Don't be ashamed of your color, don't be ashamed of your biological features, somehow you must be able to say in your own lives and really believe it I'm black but beautiful. Now in your life's blueprint be sure that you have that, a principle of somebodiness.

Secondly - in your life's blueprint, you must have as a basic principle the determination to achieve excellence. In your various fields of endeavor, You're gonna to be deciding as the days and the years unfold, what you will do in life, what your life's work will be, once you discover what it will be, set out to do it and to do it well.

And I say to you my young friends that doors are opening to each of you, doors of opportunity are opening to each of you that were not open to your mothers and your fathers, and the great challenge facing you is to be ready to enter these doors as they open.

Speaker: Martin Luther King