Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Injustice must be exposed… to the light of human conscience”

Today is Mar­tin Luther King Jr. Day, and like we do every year in hon­or of Dr. King’s mem­o­ry, I’m post­ing an excerpt from his Let­ter From Birm­ing­ham Jail.

In these pas­sages, Dr. King is express­ing his impa­tience and deep dis­ap­point­ment with so-called “white mod­er­ates”, who he laments are more con­cerned with order than jus­tice. Dr. King open­ly pon­ders whether “white mod­er­ates” are a big­ger “stum­bling block” pre­vent­ing the advance­ment of the cause of civ­il rights than racist white suprema­cist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Dr. King goes on to explain that injus­tice requires expo­sure, and that the “ten­sion” that white mod­er­ates wor­ry about already exist­ed before the work of the civ­il rights move­ment brought it to the sur­face for examination.

Many decades have elapsed since these words were writ­ten. Sad­ly, racism and injus­tice remain a painful real­i­ty for many peo­ple in this country.

Nev­er­the­less, the strug­gle for greater free­dom and equal­i­ty continues.

Here’s Dr. King. (Note that typos are con­tained in the orig­i­nal manuscript.)

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 Coun­cil­er 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.

I had hoped that the white mod­er­ate would under­stand that law and order exist for the pur­pose of estab­lish­ing jus­tice and that when they fail in this pur­pose they become the dan­ger­ous­ly struc­tured dams that block the flow of social progress.

I had hoped that the white mod­er­ate would under­stand that the present ten­sion in the South is a nec­es­sary phase of the tran­si­tion from an obnox­ious neg­a­tive peace, in which the Negro pas­sive­ly accept­ed his unjust plight, to a sub­stan­tive and pos­i­tive peace, in which all men will respect the dig­ni­ty and worth of human personality.

Actu­al­ly, we 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 all 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.

Take a few min­utes today to read the whole thing.