The arrest of Rosa Parks thrust the young pastor into leadership of a city-wide bus boycott. He persuaded his own congregation, and others who joined them, to engage in the struggle exclusively through the principles of non-violence (in this of course, he came to very different conclusions to Bonhoeffer). Only through such means, King preached, would the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association win the battle for social change. On 20th December, 1956, the buses of Montgomery were integrated following a Supreme Court ruling that local laws requiring segregation were unconstitutional. King was propelled into national, and world, prominence.

In 1957 he was elected president of the ‘Southern Christian Leadership Conference’, whose aims included co-ordinating the strategies of non-violent civil rights movements across the south. Not all of its early campaigns were successful, but they did all prepare the movement for its assault on Birmingham, Alabama. King saw Birmingham as a stronghold of racial oppression and segregation, and instinctively understood that ‘to win here was to break the backbone of segregation in the South’. It was a battle he was determined to fight without violence. He was adamant that such a strategy ‘is the only viable means for resolving conflict’.

In book after book, speech after speech, sermon after sermon, he re-iterated his basic vision. He rehearsed the history of abuse, before calling for action: ‘there comes a time when people are tired of being segregated and humiliated … of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression’. He realised that freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; and he rejected the myth of time, ‘social justice never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability’. He called for action, but rejected calls for ‘Separation’, or ‘Black Supremacy’. He argued that these were superfiical and inadequate responses, and worse, they were every bit as evil in their own way as segregation and Jim Crow laws. ‘God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and the creation of a society … where every man [sic] will respect the dignity and worth of human personality’. King wasn’t satisfied with a merely political solution to the question of segregation. He wanted something that would go beyond what was legally enforcable and that would change the hearts of a divided nation so that there would be a genuine acceptance and an authentic integration. For King, the spiritual and the political could not be divided.

‘The basic question which confronts the world’s opppressed is this: How is the struggle against the forces of injustice to be waged'?’ The means would shape the end, and he dared to believe that the example and teaching of Jesus Christ would alone bring about the end that God desired. Indeed it must. ‘The arc of the universe is long, but it tends towards justice’. King reasoned that if he worked towards God’s goal, employing Christ’s method, then victory was inevitable. King took from Christ both a commitment to non-violence as a response to the ‘enemy’, and a conviction of the necessity of ‘redemptive suffering’: a non-retaliatory suffering that absorbed evil and would lead to the redemption of society. Retaliatory violence could only lead to further and more complex problems, ‘creating bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers’. Few others, even in the leadership of the Civil Rights movement, followed King to the point of adopting non-violence as a lifestyle (King’s home was bombed, and his life and his family were repeatedly threatened before his eventual assassination in 1968) - but they could at least see that it had been vindicated as a political method; and it appears that King managed to convince them of its inherent logic: ‘the end is inseparable from and pre-existent in, the means… a moral end could never justify the use of immoral means’. History suggests they were right to be convinced by him.

It is worth pondering King’s determination to develop a strategy of loving his enemies and seeking to be reconciled to them, rather than defeat them; of turning the other cheek; of praying for those who persecuted him. When we read the Sermon on the Mount (and other passages in the Scriptures that are built on it, e.g. Rom.12:9-21; I Pet.2:19-23; 3:8-14), we can easily assume that such teaching is ‘idealistic’, and that it simple wouldn’t work in ‘the real world’. King’s example and experience show how unfounded such assumptions are. Jesus understands the world better than we do, and just because we can’t see how His teaching would work, says more about our spiritual short-sightedness than Jesus’ wisdom.

At Birmingham Alabama though, King’s thought took an unprecedented step. Until now the SCLC had operated within the law. Boycotts, sit-ins and marches had been the order of the day. But here, faced with Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses, King was driven to the realisation that where laws are unjust and where they perpetuate injustice, they must be broken. “An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law”.

We can easily look back and see where conscience told (at least ought to have to told) the Christians of a bygone era where injustice had been legitimised by being legalised. What is much harder is to ask where that injustice is perpetrated in our own laws. And of course, the much more costly question of whether and where those laws must be broken.