What the neighborhood-watch groups and activists are doing in Minneapolis seems to be working, and their tactics are worth recognizing today in particular as Americans reflect on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
The civil-rights movement was built on creating and exploiting (in the best sense) such moments of moral witness, images of contrast. And King was the most prominent promoter of this approach. Sitting in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama, in April 1963, where he was detained for eight days, he composed one of his most famous pieces of writing: a letter to a group of clergymen who were advocating a more moderate approach to activism. (The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue under the headline “The Negro Is Your Brother.”) King was in the city as part of a campaign, called Project C (for confrontation), to break segregation in a place where it was as settled as sedimentary rock. The movement organizers had planned a series of rolling marches and sit-ins everywhere from the local Woolworth’s to the public library. The cartoonishly racist commissioner of public safety known as Bull Connor had tried to shut it all down by obtaining an injunction against protesting—which is how King ended up behind bars.
Persuading the local authorities to come to the table and loosen racial restrictions demanded the “creation of tension,” King wrote in his letter. The movement would have to provoke “a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” He was even prepared to accept the label of “extremist,” he wrote. “The question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?”
The confrontations in Birmingham were being staged for an audience, just as the many people who filmed the moment when Good was shot—including the ICE officer, who sought to tell his own story—were recording for an audience. King knew that he couldn’t easily change the minds of white southerners and make them less racist overnight, but he wanted to create a moment that would anger white northerners and increase political pressure everywhere. The point of such tension was to accrue a kind of symbolic capital, which could be used to purchase specific freedoms: the freedom to sit at the Woolworth’s counter, or at the front of a bus, or in a good school.