Martin Luther King Jr.
and Malcolm X

Today one of my driving experiences was to drive a friend to visit his elderly mother at a community home in the outer suburbs, where no buses run. His mother suffers from dementia and although I knew her before she does not recognize me. So each time I go with my friend to visit her I introduce myself, usually as her son’s driver or “substitute son”. She just smiles when I say these names. But when I say “tickle, tickle” and pretend to tickle her she has a big smile of recognition and says “tickle, tickle” back to me with a light effort to tickle me. This has become our common sign of recognition.

While her son spends some time with her I usually go off to the sun room at the home and read. I am reading the “Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.” Today I was reading the “letter from the Birmingham Jail”, something I have read before. The letter was to white clergy in the area who had been critical of him for leading nonviolent direct action and causing conflict in the community. All of sudden it dawned on me that with a few word substitutions King was expressing the problem with what I called “peace liberals”, who talk peace but want to avoid any confrontation or conflict. Here is the quote and I think you can see what few words or phrases, besides ‘white moderates’ to ‘peace liberals’ could be changed to make the quote speak today. If you don’t see it, just let me say “tickle, tickle”.

“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.” — MLK

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