In 1958, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote about the ethos from which the civil rights movement emerged. He recalled a conversation he had with an influential white citizen of Montgomery, Alabama, who asked why he and his associates had come to destroy what he called the city’s long tradition of “peaceful and harmonious race relations.”

King replied, “Sir, you have never had real peace in Montgomery. You have had a sort of negative peace in which the Negro too often accepted his state of subordination. But this is not true peace. True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice. The tension we see in Montgomery today is the necessary tension that comes when the oppressed rise up and start to move forward toward a permanent, positive peace.”

The young minister then pondered whether “this was what Jesus meant when he said, ‘I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ Certainly Jesus did not mean that he came to bring a physical sword,” King wrote. “He seems to have been saying in substance: ‘I have not come to bring this old negative peace with its deadening passivity. I have come to lash out against such a peace. Whenever I come, a conflict is precipitated between the old and the new. Whenever I come, a division sets in between justice and injustice. I have come to bring a positive peace which is the presence of justice, love, yea, even the Kingdom of God.’”