Wall, Adam: Diversity

What did Martin Luther King Jr. want? Equality, nothing more. He didn’t want special rights for the Blacks that had been mistreated throughout the years. He didn’t want compensation for what the White community had done to his race since colonial times. He just wanted the same rights as any other man or woman in America. He wanted his children to be able to have a good education and to not be judged because of the color of their skin but for the character of their being. He wanted a nation where the thing that defined you were the actions you made in life.  But Dr. King was not the only person in America that wanted something. The eight ministers and rabbis of Birmingham also wanted something. Or, better yet, they didn’t want something. They didn’t want change, not during their lifetimes. They knew that the treatment of the Black community had to change but they didn’t want to have anything to do with the change. And, if there had to be change they did not want this change to cause ripples in the social fabric. The ministers seemed to sympathize with the Black community but they were not willing to help them down the road to their freedom and ending their oppression.

Dr. King knew that the only way to freedom was through peaceful protests. Violent protests would only incite even more violence and worsen the conditions for the African-American community and those who were helping them. This was the main point Dr. King was trying to make in his letter. He never incited violence in his followers. But as has always been the case, when people see violence that is the only thing they will associate with protests and revolutions.  But Dr. King weathered all the criticism with the one thing that people cannot argue against: reason. Through patient reasoning King strived to inform the people of America that his intentions were noble and his methods were noble as well. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” Dr. King showed that all he wanted was equality for every man, woman, and child in America and he showed that he had no intentions of inciting violence in his marches. He wanted peace and equality.