TODAY IN GOD . . .

On May 3, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama is met with state-sanctioned violence when authorities turn high-power fire hoses and police dogs on a group of about 2,500 young, non-violent protestors and also beat them with clubs. The chaos was captured by news cameras and for the first time many citizens grasped the gaping maw of America’s racial divide.

Later that day, Dr. King delivered a speech at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where he said, in part:

The reason I can’t follow the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy is that it ends up leaving everybody blind. Somebody must have sense and somebody must have religion. I remember some years ago, my brother and I were driving from Atlanta to Chattanooga, Tennessee. And for some reason the drivers that night were very discourteous or they were forgetting to dim their lights …. And finally A.D. looked over at me and he said, “I’m tired of this now, and the next car that comes by here and refuses to dim the lights, I’m going to refuse to dim mine.” I said, “Wait a minute, don’t do that. Somebody has to have some sense on this highway and if somebody doesn’t have sense enough to dim the lights, we’ll all end up destroyed on this highway.” And I’m saying the same thing for us here in Birmingham. We are moving up a mighty highway toward the city of Freedom. There will be meandering points. There will be curves and difficult moments, and we will be tempted to retaliate with the same kind of force that the opposition will use. But I’m going to say to you, “Wait a minute, Birmingham. Somebody’s got to have some sense in Birmingham.”