Is it ever “ill-timed” to assert that life is the fundamental civil and human right? My experience on the sidewalks and in the State House tell me that there will always be people who think so. I find encouragement in Dr. Martin Luther King’s response to a remark about human rights work being ill-timed.
In 1963, a few months before Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, he and many other civil rights activists converged on Birmingham, Alabama to challenge racial segregation. Their campaign was marked by intensive planning, discipline, and urgency as they reached for justice and reconciliation.
From a 1963 UPI report on the Birmingham demonstrations: “King reacted strongly… to a statement by Attorney General Robert Kennedy suggesting that the all-out integration drive here was ill-timed. ‘I grow weary of those who ask us to slow down,’ King told a reporter. ‘I begin to feel that the moderates in America are our worst enemy.’”
As AG, RFK had sent federal marshals to protect the Freedom Riders who worked to desegregate public transportation in the South. Yet there he was just a couple of years later, talking about another civil rights campaign being ill-timed. King wasn’t afraid to push back – and maybe put some starch back in the Attorney General’s spine.
King used the word “moderates” ironically. Civil rights, but not yet is a phony kind of moderation.
And so it is with denying not only the right to life but the right to defend it. Such denial will never be moderate, even when cloaked in euphemisms like “reproductive justice.”
Header photo: Pixabay. Post condensed from a series of MLK Day posts by the author at leavenfortheloaf.com.
Ellen Kolb 