Marian Wright Edelman pulled me from my slumber in comfortable memories to the present, where nonviolence is still a moral discipline which permits good people to overcome evil without becoming it, and there is much to do.

Writing on April 4 in the Root, the Children's Defense Fund president said:

Too many of us would rather celebrate than follow Dr. King. Some of us have enshrined Dr. King the dreamer, but have ignored Dr. King the disturber of all unjust peace. Many celebrate King the orator, but ignore his words and warnings about the need for reordering the misguided values and priorities he believed to be the seeds of America's downfall. Many remember King the vocal opponent of violence, but not King who called for massive nonviolent civil disobedience to challenge the stockpiling of weapons of death and the wars they fuel.

Ms. Edelman gently provoked me to the thought that a living Martin Luther King would have recast yesterday's civil spectacle over his death into action against poverty and war.

No abstraction-preoccupied dreamer wrote in Letter from Birmingham Jail:

Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

He had been imprisoned for defying a 1963 court injunction forbidding the peaceful protests with which the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) confronted segregation there, and was responding to a published statement by "eight Alabama clergymen."

While in agreement with the SCLC's goals, they called the Birmingham demonstrations "unwise and untimely."

His reply, scribbled in the margins of a newspaper and smuggled out by an aide, is a gentle, philosophically complex call to action against injustice.

For me the letter's core is his argument that oppressed and oppressor are bound together, so that both are harmed by evil done one by the other:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

I was still in high school when I first read those words. My response was then and is now that there is much work to do; everyone's work. Without exception.