The recent events in Egypt have kept me thinking about our history of non-violent protest in the United States.  Between the observance of Martin Luther King day in January and Black History month, I’ve tried to make a formal study of the speech that King delivered in Washington, D.C. in August, 1963.  You can read the text of the speech or watch it online.  I found that my appreciation grew the more I studied the speech and the events leading up to it.  In particular, I’ve come to appreciate how important it was for King to emphasize “the fierce urgency of now”, because at that time we still lived under a regime of racial segregation.  We see August, 1963 as a watershed moment for civil rights in America.  It is hard for us to now imagine how deeply our country  was divided by racial hatred and ignorance.  King and the others in the SCLC displayed enormous personal courage by their actions — it could not have been an easy thing to stand in the street as mounted policemen rode towards you, swinging lengths of rubber hose wrapped with barbed wire — but it is also important to remember that others before them also exemplified moral courage, sometime at great personal cost.  This post is about one of those men. [Read more…]