I write this message with love to my white allies in the fight for civil rights and racial and social justice:
On this Martin Luther King Day, I encourage you to refrain from the temptation of repeating out-of-context quotes that soothe, but don’t provoke any desire for action or true change.
Instead, please read and thoughtfully and humbly consider sources that give us a sense of the real Dr. King, not the milquetoast minister gently longing for a time when everyone can just get along.
Contrary to the Disneyfied caricature he has unfortunately been shaped into, Martin Luther King was a radical activist who demanded change and provoked fear in and harsh condemnation from many white Americans in his time.
Foremost among those who tried to muffle him were white moderates who, like many of their modern-day progeny, were all-too-certain that not only were they indispensable allies, but that allyship meant they could dictate the message, means and tones Dr. King and other African Americans should use to force that change.
So, while you will be inundated today with clips from the I Have a Dream speech and Dr. King’s quotes about love and peace, I urge you to also read his more incisive and uncomfortable words about the fight for justice and what it means to be an ally in that fight.
Among the most powerful of these teachings is Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which he directed to white clergy who had urged him not to launch a protest in the city because it would be too provacative and “now is not the time.”
“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’ … 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.
…
“Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”
If you do nothing else today to honor Dr. King, please read and then engage in some honest self-reflection of this powerful polemic that could just have well been written this morning.
https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html