gospel : " I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus ." Was not Martin Luther an extremist : " Here I stand ; I cannot do otherwise , so help me God ." And John Bunyan : " I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience ." And Abraham Lincoln : " This nation cannot survive half slave and half free ." And Thomas Jefferson : " We hold these truths to be self-evident , that all men are created equal ... " So the question is not whether we will be extremists , but what kind of extremists we will be . Will we be extremists for hate or for love ? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice ? In that dramatic scene on Calvary ' s hill three men were crucified . We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism . Two were extremists for immorality , and thus fell below their environment . The other , Jesus Christ , was an extremist for love , truth and goodness , and thereby rose above his environment . Perhaps the South , the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists ....
I have no despair about the future . I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham , even if our motives are at present misunderstood . We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham , and all over the nation , because the goal of America is freedom . Abused and scorned though we may be , our destiny is tied up with America ' s destiny . Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth , we were here . Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history , we were here . For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages ; they made cotton king ; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation-and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop . If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us , the opposition we now face will surely fail . We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands ....
Alan Grayson MLK Letter from a Birmingham Jail jOrlando , Florida October 2017
One day the South will recognize its real heroes . There will be the James Merediths , with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs , and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer . There will be the old , oppressed , battered Negro women , symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery , Alabama , who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses , and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness : " My feets is tired , but my soul is at rest ." There will be the young high school and college students , the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders , courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience ' sake . One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters , they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage , thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence .
Never before have I written so long a letter . I ' m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time . I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk , but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell , other than write long letters , think long thoughts and pray long prayers ? ...
Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our feardrenched communities , and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty .
Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood ,
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