{"id":3972,"date":"2006-03-19T11:28:01","date_gmt":"2006-03-19T11:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/profile-in-courage.html"},"modified":"2006-03-19T11:28:01","modified_gmt":"2006-03-19T11:28:01","slug":"profile-in-courage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/profile-in-courage.html","title":{"rendered":"Profile in Courage"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Lakeland, Florida, of (mostly) fond memory, comes a story by the Lakeland Ledger’s very good religion reporter, Cary McMullen, on Rev. Earl Stallings, <\/a>a Baptist minister, who was one of the 8 clergymen in Birmingham who supported Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the one who was mentioned by name in King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. <\/em>It’s a rather complicated story, and because of various turns of events, the final version of the Letter<\/em> ended up criticizing the clergymen as a symbol of over-cautious moderates. But:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

In January 1963, two days after Alabama Gov. George Wallace declared "segregation forever" in his inaugural address, Stallings joined seven other clergymen at a meeting. Five of the eight were bishops — two Methodist, two Episcopal and one Catholic. One was a Reform rabbi. Only Stallings and the Rev. Edward Ramage of First Presbyterian Church were Protestant pastors.<\/p>\n

They drafted and signed a statement, "An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense," which was a rejection of hard-line segregation. Among other things, it declared that "every human being" was entitled to "all basic rights, privileges, and responsibilities that belong to humanity."<\/p>\n

At the time the statement appeared, King and his aides were making plans for a series of demonstrations to test Birmingham’s segregation laws. They were opposed by the segregationist politician Eugene "Bull" Connor, who vowed to arrest any demonstrators.<\/p>\n

On Good Friday, fearing violence, the eight clergymen hastily drew up another statement, printed in the papers the next day, that called the demonstrations "unwise and untimely." Pointing to a runoff election the previous week that had voted Connor out of office, they stated "extreme measures" were unjustified. And they commended local law enforcement for using restraint.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What happened, of course, was that Connor’s law enforcement brigade abandoned restraint, so the clergymen’s praise became problematic when taken out of context.<\/p>\n

It’s a good article – Rev. Stallings died in Lakeland in February (hence the reason for the article)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Lakeland, Florida, of (mostly) fond memory, comes a story by the Lakeland Ledger’s very good religion reporter, Cary McMullen, on Rev. Earl Stallings, a Baptist minister, who was one of the 8 clergymen in Birmingham who supported Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the one who was mentioned by name in King’s Letter from…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nProfile in Courage - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/profile-in-courage.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Profile in Courage - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From Lakeland, Florida, of (mostly) fond memory, comes a story by the Lakeland Ledger’s very good religion reporter, Cary McMullen, on Rev. Earl Stallings, a Baptist minister, who was one of the 8 clergymen in Birmingham who supported Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the one who was mentioned by name in King’s Letter from…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/profile-in-courage.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-03-19T11:28:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Profile in Courage - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/profile-in-courage.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Profile in Courage - Via Media","og_description":"From Lakeland, Florida, of (mostly) fond memory, comes a story by the Lakeland Ledger’s very good religion reporter, Cary McMullen, on Rev. Earl Stallings, a Baptist minister, who was one of the 8 clergymen in Birmingham who supported Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the one who was mentioned by name in King’s Letter from…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/profile-in-courage.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2006-03-19T11:28:01+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/profile-in-courage.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/profile-in-courage.html","name":"Profile in Courage - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2006-03-19T11:28:01+00:00","dateModified":"2006-03-19T11:28:01+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/profile-in-courage.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/profile-in-courage.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/03\/profile-in-courage.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Profile in Courage"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}