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Every year on this day, I try to take time to sit down and read Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. Dr. King wrote the letter in April, 1963 to a group of Alabama clergymen who had expressed dismay at the methods he and the SCLC were using to agitate for civil rights in the state. It’s a compelling, rousing essay, in which King exhorts his colleagues to beware complacency. Below is one of my favorite passages:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, 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 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.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

It’s important to remember on this day that Dr. King saw the fundamental connection between civil rights, antiwar activism, and labor rights. He died in Memphis where he was addressing striking sanitation workers. I wonder what Dr. King would be fighting for today were he still alive. Health care access? An end to poverty and hunger? There’s a lot yet to be done in the spirit of Dr. King.

It’s also worth mentioning that in 1963 and after, Dr. King was considered by many, including J. Edgar Hoover, to be one of the gravest threats to the U.S. Hoover and RFK authorized COINTELPRO surveillance of King, and the FBI subsequently blackmailed and threatened him, going so far as to suggest in an anonymous letter that King ought to kill himself. At a time when too many Americans are willing to trade privacy and liberty for the appearance of increased security, it is illustrative to recall this precedent of unchecked warrantless domestic surveillance.

Dr. King would not have had the success he did were it not for the efforts of countless freedom riders, sit-in participants and other individuals willing to put themselves on the line for the cause of civil rights. Likewise, if not for the radicalism of activists like Fred Hampton, Elaine Brown, George Jackson and Bobby Seale, King would have remained at the fringe. The Black Power movement allowed King to strike a tone of centrism and reasonableness without compromising his fundamental ideals.