If I had lived in Martin Luther King Jr.’s time period, and suffered the same adversity and hatred as he did, I don’t think that I would have been able to be as complacent about it. I’m a radical; I would have been burning down buildings, busting out windows, anything to get the White men of those days to see my point. King’s approach was much more justified and reasonable. After being hated on, discriminated against, protested, and demonstrated against, King still sought to rally Birmingham’s African Americans for peaceful protests, sit-ins, and boycotts saying, “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.”
In the days of old, Whites discriminated against the African Americans simply because they thought that they were better than they. To be honest, nothing has changed. People sit around and say that “Oh, the world is such a better place because people are so much more accepting.” This is complete bullshit! The only difference between the discrimination of the 1800s and today’s is who we are discriminating against. Back then it was African Americans, now it is people who dress differently, wear their hair differently, people who don’t drive as cool a car as others, or don’t make as much money. Now I know this has nothing to do with “A Call for Unity” or “A Letter from Birmingham Jail,” but I feel as though these are the things we need to be focusing on; the things that are happening now. True, if history is ignored then it will be repeated, but what if it’s already in the process and no one is making a move to stop it?
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