What does LFB specify as NOT one of the four basic steps to a nonviolent campaign.
On April 3, 1963, Martin Luther Male monarch, Jr. (Jan 15, 1929–April 4, 1968) began analogous a series of sit down-ins and nonviolent demonstrations against racial injustice in Birmingham, Alabama. On April 12, he was violently arrested on the accuse of parading without a permit, per an injunction against "parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing" that a local circuit estimate had issued two days earlier, a week into the protests.
On the day of Dr. King's abort, eight male Alabama clergymen issued a public argument directed at him, titled "The Phone call for Unity," post-obit a letter penned a few months earlier nether the championship "An Entreatment for Constabulary and Order and Common Sense." They accused him of beingness an "outsider" to the community'southward cause, suggested that racial injustice in Alabama shouldn't be his business, and claimed that the nonviolent resistance demonstrations he led were "unwise and untimely." "We further strongly urge our own Negro community to withdraw support from these demonstrations," they wrote. It was such a blatant example of the very injustice Dr. King had dedicated his life to eradicating — the hijacking of what should exist "mutual sense" to all in the service of what is "mutual" and convenient to only those in power — that he felt compelled to respond. The post-obit mean solar day, while still in jail, he penned a remarkable book-length open letter. ("Never before have I written a letter this long," he marveled as he penned the last paragraphs.)
Enlightened of the media'due south ability to incite the pop imagination, Male monarch and his squad began distributing mimeographed copies to the clergy of Birmingham and eventually made their way to the printing. Major newspapers and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Post, published excerpts. The full text was eventually published as Alphabetic character from Birmingham City Jail (public library) and became not merely a foundational text of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s simply an indelible manifesto for social justice and the human struggle for equality in every sense of the word, in every corner of the globe.
Cartoon on his vast pool of intellectual resources — from Socrates to St. Augustine to Thoreau — and his ain singular gift for blending the powers of a philosopher, a preacher, and a poet, Dr. King debunks the clergymen's arguments one by one, get-go with their assertion that the injustice in Birmingham is non his "outsider" business organization:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
He outlines the four pillars of nonviolent resistance — which bear a poignant parallel to the four rules for arguing intelligently that philosopher Daniel Dennett would formulate more than than half a century later on — and writes:
In any nonviolent entrada there are four basic steps: ane) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive; 2) negotiation; three) self-purification; and 4) straight activeness.
In a sentiment that calls to mind Bertrand Russell'southward timeless wisdom on the effective and destructive elements in human nature — "Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power," he wrote in 1926, "but structure is more than difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it." — King puts along the wonderful notion of "creative tension" every bit a strength of constructive action:
Nonviolent straight activity seeks to create such a crunch and establish such artistic tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to face the effect… There is a type of constructive, irenic tension which is necessary for growth. Just equally Socrates felt it was necessary to create a tension in the heed so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of artistic analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the night depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of agreement and brotherhood.
Rex'southward ideas undoubtedly influenced South African writer, freedom-fighter, and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer when, a decade subsequently, she contemplated the role of the writer as precisely such a gadfly on the back of injustice — something King further illuminates when he adds:
We who engage in non-fierce directly activity are not the creators of tension. We just bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open up where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered upwards merely must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and lite, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing create, to the light of human being censor and the air of national opinion before information technology tin be cured.
He considers why such nonviolent instigation of "creative tension" is vital to the claiming of freedom:
History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may run across the moral light and give up their unjust posture; but … groups are more immoral than individuals.
Nosotros know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given past the oppressor; information technology must exist demanded by the oppressed.
He zooms in on the allegation of untimeliness and, arguing that "justice too long delayed is justice denied," and puts in poignant perspective the relativity of timeliness:
I approximate it is easy for those who accept never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." Only when you accept seen fell mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; … when you all of a sudden find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-twelvemonth-old daughter why she can't get to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on tv, and come across tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Fun-town is closed to colored children, and see depressing clouds of inferiority begin to course in her piddling mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; … when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" — then yous will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair.
Indeed, he argues that at the root of the clergymen's accusations is a profound misconception of time. Time, as nosotros know, is a human invention that Galileo perfected; like all technology, information technology is a neutral tool that can exist bent to wills good and evil, put toward ends constructive and destructive — something Male monarch captures beautifully:
All this … grows out of a tragic misconception of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually fourth dimension is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will accept used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will take to repent in this generation not simply for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, only for the bloodcurdling silence of the good people. Nosotros must come to encounter that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must apply time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the hope of democracy, and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of alliance. Now is the time to elevator out national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
He goes on to explore the expatiation of the legal system for the unjust ends of those in power:
There are two types of laws: There are just and unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no police force at all." … An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral constabulary. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust police is a human law that is non rooted in eternal police force and natural law. Whatever constabulary that uplifts human being personality is just. Whatsoever police that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an "I-information technology" human relationship for an "I-chiliad" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not but politically, economically and sociologically unsound, only information technology is morally incorrect…
[…]
An unjust law is a lawmaking that a majority inflicts on a minority group that is non bounden on itself. This is difference fabricated legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.
In a sense, contemporary popular civilization is built on the same foundation every bit unjust police — on the warping of sameness and departure, which Shonda Rhimes addressed with extraordinary elegance of insight in her Human Rights Campaign accolade acceptance spoken language. To King, indeed, the law should be reclaimed as an ally to the populace in its diverse totality rather than a formalized system of objectifying people. He sees nonviolent resistance not as a style to destroy the law but every bit a way to normalize information technology:
In no sense practise I abet evading or defying the law… That would lead to anarchy. I who breaks an unjust law must do it openly, lovingly, … and with a willingness to accept the penalization. I submit that an individual who breaks a constabulary that censor tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to agitate the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.
Simply the law, of course, cannot and should not be separate from the social forces that back up it. In i of his most poignant remarks in the letter, which resonates all the more than deeply in our nowadays civilization where impenitent reaction has replaced considered response and become the seedbed of misunderstanding, King adds:
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of sick volition. Lukewarm credence is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
Letter of the alphabet from Birmingham Urban center Jail remains an indispensable read for whatever thinking, feeling fellow member of the human family unit. Complement information technology with Einstein's little-known correspondence with Westward.E.B. Du Bois on race and racial justice and Margaret Mead on the root of racism and how to counter it.
Thank you, Jacqueline
Source: https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/18/martin-luther-king-letter-from-birmingham-city-jail/
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