When Eight Clergymen Called for Patience

On April 12, 1963 — Good Friday — police arrested Martin Luther King Jr. on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama. Days earlier, eight white clergymen had published "A Call for Unity" in the Birmingham News, urging King to abandon his protests and wait for the courts to deliver change. They called his demonstrations "unwise and untimely."

King read their statement in his jail cell. Then, beginning in the margins of that very newspaper and continuing on scraps of toilet paper and a legal pad his attorneys smuggled in, he composed his response. On April 16, he finished what would become one of the most important documents in American history. And at its moral center, King placed the words of an ancient Hebrew prophet: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."

King understood what Amos understood twenty-seven centuries before him — that the God of Israel does not accept worship from people who tolerate injustice. The prophet Amos thundered against a prosperous nation that sang hymns on the Sabbath while crushing the poor at the city gate. King challenged a church that preached love on Sunday morning while accepting segregation on Monday.

Amos 5:24 is not a gentle suggestion. It is a flood. Justice does not trickle at anyone's convenience — it rolls. When the people of God grow comfortable with injustice, the Almighty raises a prophetic voice, sometimes from the most unlikely place. Even a jail cell.