“So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice,” King wrote. Without a light or even a mattress on the bedsprings, King wrote what would become the classic “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” an intellectual and philosophical treatise that challenged white moderates for decades to come. Martin Luther King Jr., jailed with about 50 other peaceful protesters, wrote a response to local clergy members who had chastised him for upsetting Alabama’s status quo. Months before the March on Washington, where he delivered his spellbinding “I Have a Dream” speech, the Rev. Sixty years ago, a Baptist minister sat in a southern jail cell and penned the most important written statement of the civil rights movement.
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