Radical Love in the Practice of Law: Dr. King’s Enduring Challenge to Modern Advocates
President
Earl B. Gilliam Bar Association
In the popular imagination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is often reduced to a handful of quotations, a single holiday, or a softened narrative of inevitable progress. But the King who wrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and who stood at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before his assassination, was not offering comfort. He was issuing a demand. That demand was grounded in what might best be described as radical love, a disciplined, uncomfortable, and courageous commitment to human dignity that refuses neutrality in the face of injustice.