Associated Press
King blasted his era’s version of White “allies,” confessing to being, “gravely disappointed with the white moderate.” King challenged the moral equivalency of his day, which found White political and civic leaders at times castigating both the practitioners of Jim Crow segregation and the civil rights activists who protested against this unjust system.
This kind of political handwringing is reflected in parts of today’s political climate, where White moderates hesitate to support voting rights, often misinterpret prison abolitionists as anti-police agitators and have failed to make a robust case for protecting the rights of educators to teach the fuller story about American history to school children.
King wrote in 1963, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the whote moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action….”
To read this oped by Peniel E. Joseph, Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, go to: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/14...-mlk-day-joseph-ctrp
You can explore Martin Luther King, Jr.'s correspondence, sermons, speeches, published writings and unpublished manuscripts online at The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.
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