When the nation commemorates the late Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, the media often shows him delivering his impassioned “I Have a Dream” speech from the August 1963 March on Washington. My little boy’s school take-home paper mentions how throughout the 60s he peacefully stirred Americans to overturn legalized discrimination against people of color.
King originally garnered the nation’s attention in 1955 when Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. That small act of righteous defiance resulted in a year-long bus boycott to promote desegregation. Leading that protest was the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church’s 26 year-old pastor, Martin Luther King. He was so successful organizing and inspiring that city’s African-American population that when his fellow pastors created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to combat racial prejudice, they elected King its first president.
In 1963 the young minister rose to even greater prominence when he planned a massive civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, as well as voter registration drives, and those to promote better housing and education for blacks across the South. For his efforts, he was arrested three times that year.
During his stint in a Birmingham jail in April, 1963, he wrote to his fellow clergy about brotherhood and the responsibility of the Church to combat injustice. One of the oft-quoted lines from it reads, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” He ended his letter with his assurance that God would see him, and the civil rights movement, through:
I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are not understood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham, and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. . . We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. . . .
(Quoted from Great Letters in American History by Rebecca Price Janney; for a full text of this letter you may also visit http://abacus.bates.edu/admin/offices/dos/mlk/letter.html
Tags: Jr., Martin Luther King
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