Quote of the Day (King, on the Birmingham Church Bombing)

“God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city. The holy Scripture says, ‘A little child shall lead them.’ The death of these little children may lead our whole Southland from the low road of man's inhumanity to man to the high road of peace and brotherhood. These tragic deaths may lead our nation to substitute an aristocracy of character for an aristocracy of color. The spilled blood of these innocent girls may cause the whole citizenry of Birmingham to transform the negative extremes of a dark past into the positive extremes of a bright future. Indeed this tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its conscience.”—Martin Luther King Jr., eulogy for the four girls killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 2008

(King’s eulogy at the church, delivered three days after the Ku Klux Klan exploded a dynamite bomb that killed four young girls, ranks, to me, next to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in its concise, majestic power – and, perhaps even more stunningly, in its moral purification of a scene of awful carnage. Matters did indeed come to pass as King had predicted, just as “a new birth of freedom” resulted, however imperfectly achieved, from the horrible sacrifice at Gettysburg. For more on this incident and the road America has traveled since, read Bruce Kluger’s meditation in USA Today from last month, reprinted on the Huffington Post.

The four girls might have been robbed of their lives, but let their names be remembered with those of other martyrs whose names have echoed down the years: Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, all 14.)