I am in Birmingham because injustice is here . . . just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ . . . so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. . . . So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.
Thus in "Letter from Birmingham Jail" does Martin Luther King justify his leadership of nonviolent civil disobedience as a radical response to the injustice of segregation laws. King elaborates his case with reference to the moral philosophy of Western culture but chiefly to Judeo-Christian tradition and thought. He specifically cites the moral philosophy of Socrates, Augustine, the Old Testament prophets, Niebuhr, and John Bunyan, as well as the egalitarian secular value systems of Lincoln and Jefferson to support his call for absolute social equality and absolute rejection of laws that allow inequalities to exist. King advances the idea that church institutions had done little to advance the cause of racial justice: "In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities." He rejects out of hand the position of the eight white clergymen in Birmingham who criticized him for demonstrations there and prompted his writing the Letter in the first place. Instead, he asserts a direct connection between the affirmative obligations of religious--especially Christian-morality and a secular society informed by justice. By the way, this is not an exclusively religious notion. Kant's categorical imperative is the obligation to behave in a way that allows moral will to intersect with the highest good and so discover universal law. Kant considers this a moral duty, bridging the gap between intuition and action to proactively create as it were a moral universe.
To say that this is the equivalent of King's
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