The A, B, C and D of Violence

 

Aurora. Birmingham. Columbine. Dallas. Unspeakable and horrifying violence, past and present. Violence that creates such waste, snuffing out so many lives, most of whom are youth and children.

It was 1963. On March 29 Coreta's and Martin's fourth child was born: Bernice Albertine. On April 3 the Birmingham civil rights protests were launched. On April 12 Martin Luther King was arrested and jailed. On April 16 Martin wrote his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in response to a statement put out by white ministers in Birmingham calling for an end to the demonstrations. On April 20 Martin and his good friend, Ralph Abernathy, were released from jail on bond. On May 11 segregationists bombed the home of Martin's brother, the Reverend A.D. King, and the Gaston Hotel, where King had been staying. On May 13 federal troops arrived in Birmingham.

On June 11 President Kennedy announced a new civil rights proposal. The next day an assassin killed NAACP leader Medgar Evers. On June 22 King met with Kennedy to discuss the violence and the status of civil rights in the U.S. On August 28 King came to Washington, stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and delivered the "I Have a Dream" speech to those gathered for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Then on September 15, a dynamite blast at Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Church killed four young black girls while they were in Sunday School. Three days later King attended the funeral and delivered the eulogy for the children. The next day King again met with Kennedy.

On November 22 President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. 

Preparing to deliver eulogy for the slain children.

After all of these events, and in response to the death of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote the following words. They are words we need to listen to again today:

While the question, 'Who killed President Kennedy?' is important, the question 'What killed him?' is more important.

Our late President was assassinated by a morally inclement climate. It is a climate filled with heavy torrents of false accusation, jostling winds of hatred, and raging storms of violence.

It is a climate where men cannot disagree without being disagreeable, and where they express dissent through violence and murder. It is the same climate that murdered Medgar Evers in Mississippi and six innocent Negro children in Birmingham, Alabama.

So, in a sense we are all participants in that horrible act that tarnished the image of our nation. By our silence, by our willingness to compromise principle . . . . .by our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim, by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is the one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing, by allowing all these developments, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes.