A Portion of Dr King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. — Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (I Have a Dream: Writings & Speeches That Changed the World, p. 87)