Martin Luther King Jr.

From Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story by Martin Luther King Jr. (1958)

Something began to say to me, "He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it." When oppressed people willingly accept their oppression they only serve to give the oppressor a convenient justification for his acts. Often the oppressor goes along unaware of the evil involved in his oppression so long as the oppressed accepts it. So in order to be true to one's conscience and to God, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system.  This I felt was the nature of our action. From this moment on I conceived of our movement as an act of massive non-cooperation. 

This passage was written in 1958.  Today, King's biased choice of pronouns seems very dated to our ears. He was in fact unaware that his choice of words were reflective of a massive system of oppression which pushed women to the margins.  A modern day King, writing this paragraph in 2017, would not have made the same mistake.  Even so, King's words are timeless in their underlying meaning.  Often systems of oppression are so pervasive that oppressors are not even aware of the harm they do. Often victims of opression are complicit with their own oppression.  We are all called to "massive non-cooperation" with evil systems.

Photo credit: Dick DeMarsico, World Telegram staff photographer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons