It's on all of us: Center for Story & Witness statement on racial justice.

In August 1963, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. — imprisoned in Birmingham, Alabama, for taking part in an anti-segregation demonstration — was on the receiving end of a public statement issued by a group of white religious leaders who, although they agreed with King’s civil rights goals, believed he was pushing too hard, and too fast, for change.

“Letter From Birmingham Jail,” King’s 7,000-word response to those who did not share his sense of moral urgency, remains as relevant today as it was over half a century ago. His historic words are also a call to conscience in the moment we now live. “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion,” King says at one point, “that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is … 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.”

What has endured alongside the racism and inequality that today plagues America and much of the world is the unwillingness of far too many of us to confront it. And to enter into true common cause with Black, Brown, and marginalized communities that are fighting, literally, for their lives.

Over the last few years, a word that we have heard over and over again to describe the unequal conditions in our country and the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery is “heartbreaking.” But it is not enough — it has never been enough — for our hearts to break over injustice. Compassion is only a starting point. Action — sustained, strategic, and insistent action — is what is necessary now.