Letter from Birmingham Jail (The Essential Speeches of Dr. Martin Lut)

I look over at the table between us and I start laughing and said, well, this was not planned. But but actually, Doug Jones is the only senator whose signature I have in this office.

And sitting on the table next to the bust of Winston Churchill is a printed copy of Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail.

He started a tradition of reading the entirety of letter from a Birmingham jail on the floor of the Senate, and he did it as a bipartisan, he invited six senators to participate.

And it is a letter to Christian pastors...to stand up against racism and stand up against evil, and there's a great portion in it where he says the church and leaders in the church...We should be a thermostat and not a thermometer.

In other words, we shouldn't just reflect the temperature of those around us, but rather the leaders of the church should be influencing those around us with truth and with justice.

I was going to suggest Letter from a Birmingham Jail in part because it is short, but also it's incisive and there are-

I've had my children read it. I have my little copy in my basement office, which I read from time to time. It's really extraordinary.

King is writing this letter to white pastors who were telling him that his agitation was actually undermining the civil rights movement.

So there's this larger narrative there about the role of white churches and their complicity with their silence and telling them that, yeah, no, this is the time to do this. You're telling people to be quiet and to wait their turn actually is actually not helping to advance the movement.

And I think that there are things that he can still speak to us 60 years later in just how he is addressing issues. And it's a short read.

And some people pointed out, but most people forget that one of the targets of King's frustration and I guess you can say anger was who? It was the white moderate, right? Who expressed misgivings about going too fast, even though it had been hundreds of years.