letter from Birmingham Jail by MLK

King said that it was dangerous to treat him and his followers as outside agitators, famously stating that

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly ... Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."

King believed nonviolent direct action brought about "constructive tension."

Tension was intended to compel meaningful negotiation with the white power structure, without which true civil rights could never be achieved. King argued that black leaders drew on experience: "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."

King took issue with the notion of inevitable progress towards equal rights.

African Americans had waited and suffered long enough asking for protection of their God-given natural and constitutional rights: "Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, 'Wait”

Henry David Thoreau famously argued for principles of "Civil Disobedience" and ignoring immoral laws

King believes this too, pointing to St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, saying, "(Slubmit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."

According to St. Augustine, there was a moral responsibility to ignore unjust laws, for, "an unjust law is no law at all."

King looks to history, both to observe the Biblical story of disobeying the laws of Nebuchadnezzar and that everything Hitler did in Nazi Germany was "legal." Turning to the present situation, King said that segregation laws were immoral and unjust "because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority."

King did not necessarily see the Civil Rights movement as extreme, but rather moderate compared to other similar social movements

Yet, he also recognizes that Jesus and other great reformers in history were extremists-including Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. King quotes from the DOI and "House Divided" speech. And he asks: "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?" As he also reminds his audience, oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever and the "urge for freedom will come eventually."

King also took aim at white moderates and black nationalists as being dangerous

saying that Elijah Muhammed and his followers wrongly treated whites as the devil and rejected Christianity. To white moderates, King wrote that, "I should have realized that few members of a race that has oppressed another race can understand or appreciate the deep groans and passionate yearnings of those that have been oppressed, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent, and determined action

se moderates, King felt, the righteous cause of the Civil Rights movement.

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