“It seems to me that integration at its best is the opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity”: Martin Luther King Jr., eleven months before his death, in an interview with NBC’s Sander Vanocur.
The date of the interview: May 8, 1967. The earliest Oxford English Dictionary citation for its 1.d. definition of diversity,
The fact, condition, or practice of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds, and (more recently) of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.,is from December 26, 1968. It’d be a wonderful thing if King’s use of the word in this interview were to make it into the dictionary as an earlier citation. I turned myself into a dictionary person yesterday to try to make that happen.
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