Niebuhr chose to listen to southern moderates like Faulkner and Carter on race, rather than to civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., who regarded Faulkner’s counsel to “go slow, pause for a moment” as a “tranquilizing drug of gradualism.” “It is hardly a moral act to encourage others patiently to accept injustice which he himself does not endure,” King wrote, in a response influenced by Niebuhr himself. Because Niebuhr identified with white moderates in the South more than with their black victims, he could not really feel their suffering as his own.
