Dr. King has some things to say about the 2008 campaign

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. sat with the local newspaper in a Birmingham jail nearly 45 years ago, he began feverishly scribbling in the margins. King had just finished reading a letter penned by eight white Alabama clergymen that, while granting that there might be inequality in society, insisted that redress for such inequity “should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations with local leaders, and not in the streets.” In other words, they wanted Dr. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference to pull out of Birmingham and stop making so much noise about the injustice so that the entrenched powerbrokers could continue to negotiate in bad faith, while in reality doing nothing more than perpetuating the status quo.

What King wrote in the margins of that paper eventually grew into “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” In it, the Reverend said a great many things still of relevance today, but I will pull just a few lines that jumped out at me this morning:

I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes.

. . . .

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling, for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

. . . .

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

. . . .

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

. . . .

[W]e who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

Need I say more?


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)