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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 8/31/17

MLK Jr. Wrote From Jail: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere"

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Others, who follow a different faith, or no organized faith, find their moral center in different ways, choosing between good and evil from a center that will not yield to easy exploitation of their weaknesses.

How Trump responded to Charlottesville, with his "both sides" comment, was the lowest point in a series of his political low points, beginning with the racist "birther" nonsense at the start of his presidential campaign.

CNN reported on Charlottesville:

"A group of white supremacists -- screaming racial, ethnic and misogynistic epithets -- rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, August 19. One person was killed and 19 others were injured when a car sped into a group of counter-protesters.

"This is what the President of the United States said about it:

"'We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides. It's been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.'

"... It's hard to imagine a less presidential statement in a time in which the country looks to its elected leader to stand up against intolerance and hatred. ...

"Both sides don't scream racist and anti-Semitic things at people with whom they disagree. They don't base a belief system on the superiority of one race over others. They don't get into fistfights with people who don't see things their way. They don't create chaos and leave a trail of injured behind them."

We have reached a point in our national distress where we need a moral leader like Martin Luther King, Jr., ready to lead others into a revolt against the absence of a moral center in the nation.

The churches of King's era, the 1960s, engaged with great strength in battles against the Vietnam War and for women's equality. Racial inequality, in contrast was treated gingerly. Church leaders were slow to confront the racial status quo.

On August 27, 2009, I wrote a Wall Writingsposting which looked back to a time when Martin Luther King, Jr., sat in a Birmingham, Alabama, jail cell, writing a letter on April, 16, 1963, to Protestant, Catholic and Jewish leaders in Birmingham.

In June 1963, the Christian Century was the first large-circulation magazine to publish the full text of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

King addressed them as "My Dear Fellow Clergymen" since they were all duly recognized as clergy leaders (five of them were bishops) and they were all male.

In his letter, he wrote:

"I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their 'thus saith the Lord' far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid. ...

"I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. 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. ...

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James Wall served as a Contributing Editor of The Christian Century magazine, based in Chicago, Illinois, from 1999 through 2017. From 1972 through 1999, he was editor and publisher of the Christian Century magazine. Many sources have influenced (more...)
 

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