In Letter from the Birmingham Jail, written in 1963 while he was imprisoned for protesting racial segregation, King observed that white moderates played a fundamental—albeit implicit—part in the resistance to racial equality: I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who
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