“Strength to Love” misquoted

A popular quote attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr. has been making its way quickly around social media over the last 24 hours, I imagine to represent a sentiment shared by the users of the sites.  It goes like this:

‎”I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Having read Strength to Love, I thought it wise to look up this passage in my copy, as I thought it was slightly off.  I remembered it being from the chapter ‘Loving Your Enemies,’ but it turned out to be much further off than I thought.  Here’s the text from the book:

“Let us move now from the practical how to the theoretical why: Why should we love our enemies?  The first reason is fairly obvious.  Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.  Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.  Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.”
- from Strength to Love
(Chapter 5, Section 2)

What I have to believe then is that someone connected these two quotes in their mind (not sure where the first one came from, it’s not from Strength to Love), and put it out there for the world to copy-paste-share/tweet.

Well-intentioned, probably… but unfortunately, mis-quoted.  Just thought you should know.

Update: the original post has supposedly been discovered on the facebook page of Jessica Dovey, as she paired her own thought with Dr. King’s.  Somehow in the copying-and-pasting that followed, the quotation marks got moved around to make it appear as one quote, attributed to King.