Welcome to Words Matter with Katie Barlow.

Welcome to Words Matter, I'm Katie Barlow.

Our goal is to promote objective reality.

As a wise man once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, not their own facts.

Words have power and words have consequences.

Welcome to Words Matter.

Given all that has happened in this country over the last few weeks,

we thought it an important this week to highlight one of the most significant and consequential calls for racial equality and social justice in American history.

A letter from Birmingham, jail.

On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and fellow civil rights leaders were arrested in Birmingham, Alabama,

as they led a now famous campaign of non-violent direct action to protest racial segregation and oppression in that southern city.

In the early 1960s, Birmingham was one of the most racially segregated cities in the United States, enforced by both law and culture.

Black citizens faced legal and economic oppression and violent retribution when they attempted to even draw attention to these conditions.

The Birmingham campaign would become a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

President Kennedy's address to the nation on civil rights in June of 1963, the August 1963 March on Washington, and many other significant events were a direct result of this campaign and Dr. King's now famous letter.

After his arrest, Dr. King was subjected to unusually harsh conditions in the Birmingham jail.

During his incarceration, an ally smuggled in a local newspaper that contained a call for unity, a letter from eight white Alabama clergymen criticizing Dr. King and his methods.

While these white clergymen agreed that social injustices existed, they argued that they should be fought in the courts, not in the streets.

In the margins of that newspaper, Dr. King began writing his response.

As you listen to his words, paper-ticular attention as he calls out the tepid support of so-called white moderates.

Quote, I must confess that over the years I've been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride towards freedom is not the white citizens counselor or the Cluclux planner, but the white 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 cannot agree with your methods of direct action, who paternalistically believes that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom, who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a more convenient season.

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