By Mathias Risse, Harvard University
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Moral courage, for King, meant stepping into dangerous spaces where our presence is needed. It is much more than offering distant sympathy.
Moral courage was at the heart of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and message. It is impossible to understand him—especially as he appears in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail”—without noting how he consistently called upon ordinary people to take risky and often lonely stands for what they knew was right. It therefore makes sense to speak here of “moral courage”—a term King sometimes used explicitly and often explored in substance even when he did not use the term.
For MLK, moral courage was not an abstract virtue, something to pay lip service to. It was a practical force for changing an unjust world.
This year’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day is an especially good occasion for reflection on the importance of moral courage. Last year, notably, MLK Day was also Inauguration Day. As far as the U.S. is concerned, we have learned a lot about moral courage since then. I submit that the main thing we have learned is that such courage is rarer among elites than one might have hoped but still quite common among those ordinary people with whom MLK was concerned (see e.g., here).
In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King was writing from a cell, answering moderate white clergy who criticized his tactics as “unwise and untimely.” He was in jail then, in April 1963, precisely because he acted on his moral conviction. He could have stayed home in Atlanta. Instead, he went to Birmingham, a city known for violent resistance to desegregation—because, as he put it, “injustice is here.” Moral courage, for King, meant stepping into dangerous spaces where our presence is needed. It is much more than offering distant sympathy.
A first element of King’s understanding of moral courage is his insistence on the duty to break unjust laws, to do so nonviolently, and to accept the consequences. He argues that one has a legal and a moral responsibility to obey just laws, and a moral responsibility to disobey unjust ones. What this means is that courage is not simply about bearing suffering patiently—it is about choosing to confront systems that violate human dignity, even when those systems are backed by courts and police.
King praises early Christians who were willing to face imprisonment and death rather than submit to what they considered immoral commands. In the same spirit, he defends civil rights protesters who break segregation ordinances and then submit to arrest. Acceptance of punishment is essential because it dramatizes the injustice of the law and appeals to the conscience of the broader community. Moral courage is both principled and strategic. It seeks to awaken people instead of just preserving one’s own integrity (though that of course is important).
Today we can see a similar moral courage especially in Iran, where, in recent weeks, large numbers of citizens have poured into the streets to protest repression, knowing full well that they may face arrest, beatings, or worse.
This readiness to endure consequences for the sake of justice is not a relic of the American civil rights movement. Today we can see a similar moral courage especially in Iran, where, in recent weeks, large numbers of citizens have poured into the streets to protest repression, knowing full well that they may face arrest, beatings, or worse. Many of them have marched, chanted, and spoken out not because they imagine they are safe, but precisely because they know they are not. Like King in Birmingham, they have reached a point where they can no longer be satisfied with quiet submission to unjust power. Thousands have paid with their lives, and many more are now awaiting the regime’s retaliation.
The situation in Iran is different in many important ways from the American civil rights struggle and from the situation in the U.S. today. One key difference is that the regime in Iran seems beyond reform—which is something MLK would not have said of the U.S. of his day, and it is something we do not need to say of the U.S. today. Another key difference is that under the circumstances it would be implausible to interpret the Iranian protests as fully reflecting King’s tactics, especially his insistence that protesters willingly face the consequences.
King faced jail, beatings, constant threats—but operated within a system where legal protection was theoretically possible, where national media could document abuses, where federal intervention was conceivable. Iranian protesters face extrajudicial execution, torture, sexual violence, disappearances—and all that in a system designed to prevent documentation and international intervention. The consequences are not just harsher; they are qualitatively different in that they often do not lead to consciousness-raising but to silencing. This affects strategy: King wanted to be arrested publicly. Iranian protesters often must weigh whether their sacrifice will even be known.
Still, MLK Day has to be a day when moral courage is central. And in that regard, it is fair to talk about these two stages of American history and the current situation in Iran together on this particular occasion.
A second element of King’s view is his critique of silence and cowardice disguised as moderation. One of the sharpest parts of the Birmingham letter is his disappointment with white moderates who claimed to support civil rights “in principle” but rejected protest as too extreme, too fast, or too disruptive. They told him to wait. They insisted that negotiation without direct action was the only responsible path.
King’s response is an immensely powerful lesson in moral courage. He argues that nonviolent direct action is what makes meaningful negotiation possible—it creates the kind of tension that a community can no longer ignore. Without that creative tension, those in power have little incentive to change anything. Thus, so-called moderates who counsel eternal patience and calm are no real friends of justice. They are preserving an unjust status quo while soothing their conscience with gentle words.
King’s frustration with such caution invites us, in the present, to take a hard look at our own attitude toward those who resist oppression in other parts of the world. His letter suggests that moral courage is something we have good reason to admire highly and in fact seek to embolden in people risking their lives in the streets. And it is something we must demand of ourselves as we decide whether to stand with them openly, to amplify their voices, and to let their suffering disturb our own comfort.
Moral courage is not just about personal bravery but about taking risks to build or strengthen a community where everyone’s dignity is respected.
Third, King ties moral courage closely to his vision of the “beloved community”—a term he uses often, though not in the “Letter.” (He apparently adopted it from the philosopher Josiah Royce.) It might be easy to think of courage as something individualistic, as being about heroes standing alone against the world. King does honor individuals who act bravely, but he never stops there. His goal is to transform society, hoping that justice and love will shape our common life. Moral courage is not just about personal bravery but about taking risks to build or strengthen a community where everyone’s dignity is respected.
Moral courage therefore requires us to care about what happens to people we do not know personally, people who may be very different from us. It means reading about or witnessing injustice and refusing to say, “That’s not my problem.” In the “Letter,” King emphasizes that he cannot sit by in Atlanta when injustice is ravaging Birmingham because all communities are interconnected.
King’s famous claim from the “Letter” that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” may sound like a slogan until we put concrete faces to it. When people in Iran demand basic political and human rights and are met with violence, imprisonment, and death, their struggle might feel far away from our daily routines. But King’s vision of a “network of mutuality” does not allow us to treat their fate as unrelated to our own. Suppression of peaceful dissent in any country is not just that nation’s internal affair. Instead, it is what King might want to describe as a wound in the global body of the beloved community.
A difference from King’s approach, to be sure, is that the situation in Iran seems to be beyond a stage in which protesters could still reasonably aim to create a creative tension in the body politic overall. Another difference is that King could appeal to shared Christian values and could cite the Bible to white clergy. His moral language assumed common ground. By contrast, Iranian protesters resist a regime that claims religious authority, where the state's ideology is inseparable from its interpretation of Islam. The moral courage here sometimes involves rejecting religious justifications for oppression—which makes for very different dynamics. In Iran, if and when revolutionary change comes to the country, it would take considerable efforts to rebuild community. That the son of Iran’s last shah, who was toppled in 1979, seeks to play a leadership role makes clear how difficult the rebuilding of Iranian society will be after almost half a century of the current regime.
And still, the Iranian protesters have shown us moral courage in its most demanding form. The question is what we will do in response—as members of King's "network of mutuality," in which one people's oppression diminishes us all. This might mean concrete political action: demanding that our governments respond meaningfully to human rights abuses rather than prioritizing narrow geopolitical interests and rather than acting hastily to appear responsive. (In light of the possibility of an American intervention in Iran, the recent intervention in Venezuela should make us worry that such an intervention would reflect perspectives of U.S. President Trump, rather than a forward-looking ambition to bring Iran to a better place.) Or it might mean sustaining attention when the media moves on, ensuring that those who risk everything are not forgotten when the next crisis arrives.
On this MLK Day, we might honor King best by asking: Where am I being a comfort-first moderate? What injustice in my own sphere of influence am I avoiding because confronting it would be uncomfortable? We might then honor the Iranian protesters not with passive sympathy but with active solidarity—knowing that solidarity from safety has limits, but that those limits are not an excuse for silence or lack of concern.
King's own moral courage was embodied in the streets of Birmingham. Iranian moral courage is embodied in the streets of Tehran, Mashhad, or Babol. Ours must be embodied wherever we actually stand—in the specific places where our voices carry weight and our choices have consequences. Anything less is not actually moral courage but is merely admiration of it.
