Gospel of Freedom Quotes

“King established a Pan-African frame for what was to follow. He harkened back to a night in West Africa in 1957 when he stood with Ralph Bunche and the black congressmen Adam Clayton Powell and Charles Diggs and witnessed Kwame Nkrumah’s installation as the first president of the new nation of Ghana. Being there had called up the most primal associations, linking him, present-day Africans, and his own slave forebears in an intimate embrace. He had strolled the streets of Accra and wept with joy as he heard both young and old Ghanaians calling out “free-doom!”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“We are gravely mistaken if we feel that Christianity is a religion to protect us from the pain and agony of mortal existence. Christianity has always insisted that there is a Good Friday before every Easter, and that the cross we bear always precedes the crown we wear.”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“Racism is very deep in this country,” he said. “Do you know that in America the white man sought to annihilate the Indian, literally to wipe him out, and he made a national policy that said in substance, the only good Indian is a dead Indian? Now a nation that got started like that has a lot of repentin’ to do.” His antiwar oratory acquired the same quality of jeremiad. “God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war … But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. The God that I worship has a way of saying ‘Don’t play with me’ … Be still and know that I’m God. And if you don’t stop your reckless course, I’ll rise up and break the backbone of your power.”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“Daily we should take account and ask: What have I done today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation.”15 Tellingly,”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“King rejects churches that embrace “a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, unbiblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.” But”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“The time is always right to do what is right. Now is the time to realize the American dream. Now is the time to transform the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man into a glowing daybreak of justice and freedom.” Such”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“After proclaiming as a virtual destiny that the oppressor could not possibly understand or empathize with the oppressed, King was offering white oppressors a second chance; they might be clueless but not hopeless. Maybe interracial understanding was possible after all. Maybe they could respond to the cry for justice if they could first feel the injustice. As”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“If you end up doing nothing but praying we will be living in segregation two hundred or three hundred years from now … God will never allow prayer to become a substitute for working intelligence.”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“He took aim at the core of American culture, the vast universe of people who imagined themselves to be decent but never dwelled on the shame of American racism.”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“The same people “will curse you and damn you when you say be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.” Did they not know, as King put it to Clarence Jones, that “I can’t equivocate when we’re bombing innocent women and children … you should know I’m a minister of God before I’m a civil rights leader”?95”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“Nothing in the “Letter,” nothing in the bedlam of Birmingham or its bittersweet aftermath, suggest that King viewed America as a providential nation whose destiny was freedom. Rather, that exceptional nation first had to be created by the exceptionally brave and spiritual people of the civil rights movement.”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“Looking back in 1964, King observed, “Negroes have straightened their backs in Albany. And once a man straightens his back you can’t ride him anymore.”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

“Instead of sitting down at lunch counters, Wallace vowed to stand in the entranceway to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama.”
― Jonathan Rieder, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation