Today on Good Friday, 1969, we remember the life and sacrifi ce of Martin Luther King Jr. who gave himself totally to the nonviolent struggle for peace and justice. In his letter from Birmingham jail, Dr. King describes better than I could our hopes for the strike and boycott: “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.” . . . YOU MUST understand, I must make you understand, that our membership—and the hopes and aspirations of hundreds of thousands of the poor and dispossessed that have been raised on our account—are, above all, human beings . . . We are men and women who have suffered and endured much and not only because of our abject poverty but because we have been kept poor. The color of our skins, the languages of our cultural and native origins, the lack of formal education, the exclusion from the democratic process, the numbers of our slain in recent wars—all these burdens generation after generation have sought to demoralize us, to break our human spirit. But God knows we are not beasts of burden, we are not agricultural implements or rented slaves, we are men . . . I know and accept my responsibility for preventing, if possible, the destruction of human life and property. For these reasons and knowing of Gandhi’s admonition that fasting is the last resort in place of the sword . . . I undertook a 25-day fast. I repeat to you the principle enunciated to the membership at the start of the fast: if to build our union required the deliberate taking of life, either the life of a grower or his child, or the life of a farmworker or his child, then I choose not to see the union built.