Apr 4, 2019
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Content of Character
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic words still ring true today, more than 50 years after his tragic assassination. Judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. He preached nonviolent resistance, a warning political extremists should heed today.
Sean
Yes, he preached equality, but our systems don’t act with equality in mind. “After all, if equality were simply a matter of codification, Jim Crow never would have happened… The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s was a multifaceted effort by a group of people that were sick of legal and extralegal mistreatment by its government and the white-dominated society from whence that government came. The symptoms of that mistreatment took many forms, and one of the most prominent was citizen abuse by law enforcement.” (Source: https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/how-equal-rights-black-americans-still-arent-equal-enough) Dr. King was an astounding man. It takes a certain level of tenacity and courage to maintain that position when you and your community are being physically abused, fire hosed, and even killed by the very people who are supposed to be protecting you (law enforcement). Yet, he still committed to non-violence even in the face of egregious and oppressive government systems. That’s not equality. That’s not freedom. Simply preaching equality doesn’t inherently make our systems equal.