it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
Bob said, if you know your history / then you would know where you're coming from
And so I visited the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, Alabama. By myself, which is my preferred way to visit museums.
I heard the voices of Rev. Shuttlesworth, of Gov. George "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” Wallace, of Gov. John “Wallace is but an amateur when it comes to segregation” Patterson. I learned the name Constance Baker Motley, daughter of Nevis, first Black woman to argue a case at the US Supreme Court.
I saw one of the buses—a bombed out shell—that the Freedom Riders rode in. I saw one of the stained glass windows that survived the bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church. Fourteen-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and 11-year-old Cynthia Wesley did not survive.
I saw, in all its resplendent white terror, a Klan robe. Hood and all, courtesy of anonymous donation.
Attribution:
I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. So I have tried to make it clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or even more, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.
— from “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King Jr. (August 1963)