My Dear Fellow Clergymen, You ask why we must engage in sit-ins and marches rather than wait for the courts to act. The answer is simple: we have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the sting of segregation to say "wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your Black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society — then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. You may well ask, "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches?" The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a crisis that forces a community to confront an issue it has refused to address. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." There is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.

The four of us talked about it for weeks before we actually did it. We were scared — I won't lie about that. We were eighteen and nineteen years old, and we knew that people had been beaten and killed for less. But we were also angry, and we were tired of being angry without doing anything. On February 1, we walked into Woolworth's, bought some school supplies at one counter — which they were happy to sell to us — and then sat down at the lunch counter. The waitress said, "We don't serve colored here." We said we had just been served at the other counter. She walked away. We stayed. People stared. Some white customers cursed at us. The manager came and asked us to leave. We said, very politely, that we would like to be served. He said he couldn't serve us. We said we would wait. And we sat there until the store closed. The next day we came back, and this time twenty students came with us. The day after that, sixty. By the end of the week, hundreds of students were sitting in at Woolworth's and at lunch counters all over Greensboro. Within two months, sit-ins had spread to fifty-four cities in nine states. What surprised me most was the power of it. Four teenagers sitting quietly at a lunch counter — no weapons, no shouting, no violence — and we shook the whole system. They could beat us. They could arrest us. But they could not make us believe we were less than human. And as long as we kept sitting there, the whole world could see the injustice for itself.

An Act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Section 2. No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color. Section 4. No citizen shall be denied the right to vote in any Federal, State, or local election because of his failure to comply with any test or device. [This banned literacy tests, which had been used across the South to prevent Black citizens from registering to vote.] Section 5. Any State or political subdivision with a history of voter discrimination must receive approval from the federal government before changing any voting law or practice. [This "preclearance" requirement gave the federal government direct oversight over states that had suppressed Black voting.] [Impact: Within three years of the Act's passage, nearly a million new Black voters registered across the South. The number of Black elected officials in the South increased from fewer than 100 in 1965 to more than 1,500 by 1970.]

The so-called civil rights demonstrations now disrupting cities across the South are not acts of courage or conscience. They are acts of lawlessness designed to intimidate communities and override the will of the majority. These agitators — many of them from outside our state — come into our towns and deliberately break our laws, then claim the moral high ground when they are arrested. They block sidewalks, disrupt businesses, and provoke confrontations with law enforcement. When officers restore order, the Northern press photographs only the moment of arrest, never the provocation that caused it. We do not deny that there are problems to be solved. But the proper way to address them is through the courts and the legislatures, not through mob action in the streets. Our laws were passed by elected representatives. If those laws are unjust, the remedy is at the ballot box, not at the lunch counter. The people of Mississippi are capable of managing their own affairs without interference from Washington or from outside agitators. We ask only to be left alone to solve our problems in our own way and in our own time.