@BillRM,
I'm thankful King followed Gandhi's model rather than the one most of us would have chosen if those had been our dead babies in the church in Birmingham.
The expectation of a response from the black community that is far more humane than the treatment they have to endure bothers me.
I "hope" the response isn't violent, but do I understand when it's not? Of course I do.
Think of the father of some precious child who has been raped or murdered by some pedo or just plain murderer.
The father stands at the courthouse, and when the child-killer is walked past him, daddy blows him to hell. Admit it. We tend to arch an eyebrow and think - way to go, daddy. Illegal civil disobedience - but his baby was tortured and killed and that perp deserved it.
Because we care about those kids. Especially if the kid was little. And white.
You know it's true.
We have a multitude of black Americans who've been victimized individually and collectively. Some of them engage in civil disobedience. If we care about them and their histories, we may hate the violence but only a small amount of empathy at least helps us to understand why.
I believe we are on the cusp of changing it, but we have real work to do to get there.