If you’ve never actually read the test of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail, knock off for about 20 minutes and click the link. It seems like all we get 45 years on are sound bites and quick clips – you need to read the full text to realize that this wasn’t just some random “black leader,” this was somebody with three degrees and an unimpeachable background in sociology, theology, and Western philosophy, whose argument knit together everything from the Fiery Furnace to the uprising in Hungary and who quoted everybody from Reinhold Niebuhr to T.S. Eliot.
This guy was good.
More later, on why 40 years isn’t as long as it feels like.
Amen. I hadn’t read that in years — thanks for the reminder to do so again. There will never be another like him.