On October 26, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia. His talk was called “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?” He told them: “If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures.” He hoped people would one day say: “Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”
King had used the image since at least 1957. In an Atlanta speech that year he credited the idea to Benjamin Mays: “Do your job so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn could do it no better.”