In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. outlined a strategy to expose official brutality. Anti-ICE protesters are following it—and it’s working.
None of this makes the death of Renee Nicole Good any less tragic. But it is worth understanding that the confrontation emerged from a strategy—revealing tension by exposing the moral deficiency of the government’s behavior. And this deficiency has, to many Americans, been exposed. That martyrdom can be the cost of such a revelation, and that change might be possible only through injury or death, is a sad commentary on the human brain and heart. Sometimes we need to be shown what is wrong in the world—shown in the most unambiguous of terms—before we are willing to act. For King, this was the point of nonviolent civil disobedience, “to bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.” As he explained in his letter from jail: “Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”
