Entry 35. The man in the jail cell

It’s a little hard to believe, but once upon a time a person’s worth was measured by the tint of his skin color. A little more than 100 years after Thoreau, a man led nonviolent protests against laws that prohibited dark-skinned people from sitting in the same restaurant seats or bus benches as lighter-skinned people.

His revolution, as a darker-skinned man, consisted one day of sitting in a chair reserved for lighter-skinned people in an Earth city called Birmingham. He actually was thrown into jail for this act, and while sitting in his cell, he wrote about the value of taking direct action in a nonviolent fashion:

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. 

Martin Luther King Jr. was successful in shining light on how silly the laws were, and it wasn’t long before dark- and light-skinned people were sitting together in the same places. It was many years, however, before some people got over that weird prejudice. In fact King was murdered by someone who thought he was taking people too far too fast.

He had addressed that issue, too, in the Birmingham jail, because some of his critics argued that the protests came at the wrong time and he would have done better to wait.

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” he wrote. “Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was ‘well timed’ in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

Dark-skinned people had to wait literal centuries to achieve justice; the people of Sirius 4 found their freedom in a matter of decades. The reason, in part, was that resisters like King had demonstrated the path to liberty.

Entry 36. March to the sea