I'm thinking and reading up on Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., inspired by the fact that celebration of his birthday is this Jan. 15th. I'm working in particular with his Letter from Birmingham Jail from 1963.

King wrote the letter from the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama, after a peaceful protest against segregation. The letter is a response to a statement made by eight white Alabama clergymen on April 12,1963 titled "A Call For Unity" which agreed that social injustices were taking place but expressed the belief that the battle against racial segregation should be fought solely in the courts and not taken onto the streets. King responded that, without forceful, direct actions such as his, true civil rights could never be achieved. As he put it, "This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.'" He asserted not only that civil disobedience is justified in the face of unjust laws, but also that "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

I'm going to blog daily through next Monday on the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and related thoughts, feel free to join in. Read the letter here.

My focus tonight is on this piece:

 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. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

This still happens, social justice folks get accused of being outsiders, outside agitators. But if we are who we say we are, and we are here because we fiercely care and are standing up for the rights of all, are we ever really outsiders? Who decides who is outside and inside?