What did MLK say about white moderates?

The white moderate stands at the center of one of my deepest disappointments — and I wrote about it with great candor in the Letter from Birmingham Jail. The core of my frustration was this: I had come to believe that the greater obstacle to freedom was not the open enemy but the lukewarm friend. As I wrote in that letter, “the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice”. That sentence cost me something to write, because I did not want to believe it. But honesty required it. The white moderate's particular sin was not hatred — it was a misunderstanding of time and urgency. He agreed with our goals but endlessly deferred our freedom to a more "convenient season," as though justice could be scheduled at someone else's leisure. He preferred, as I put it, a negative peace — the mere absence of tension — over a positive peace, which is the presence of justice. And yet I never lost hope entirely. Even in that same letter, I acknowledged those white brothers and sisters who had marched with us, suffered with us, and “recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful ‘action’ antidotes to combat the disease of segregation”. The moderate's failure was not of the heart, but of the will.