Letter from Birmingham Jail
Adapted from "MLK's manifesto:
Letter from Birmingham Jail at 50"
(by Robert Westbrook in The Christian Century, April 8, 2013)
On Good Friday, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama. On that day, King had led a march through the streets of Birmingham, violating an injunction that the city had won
against such protests. King and his colleague Ralph Abernathy were taken to jail and placed in solitary confinement.
Shortly after
the arrests, eight of Alabama’s prominent religious leaders—two Episcopal
bishops, two Methodist bishops, the pastor of the leading white Baptist church
in Birmingham, a leader of the Alabama Presbyterian churches, a Catholic bishop
of the diocese that included Birmingham, and a prominent Reform rabbi—published
a statement, a “Call for Unity,” in the Birmingham News attacking the
civil rights campaign in the city as “unwise and untimely” and a provocation to
hatred and violence. Citing the hope for a negotiated settlement circulating
among moderates, the clergy praised law
enforcement officials for their restraint and appealed “to both our white and
Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.”
Crafting the letter
King read this
statement in a copy of the newspaper smuggled into his cell by an associate. In
controlled fury, he began to craft a letter of reply in its margins and then on
paper smuggled into his cell.
King's letter was a powerful
indictment of the shortcomings of timid moderation in the face of injustice, a
sermon of chastisement—a shrewd, tough-minded, even militant political
document. It was the work, that is, not of King the “dreamer” of racial unity,
whom we find at the center of posthumous commemoration, but of the King too
often forgotten: the agitator, the prophet of potentially liberating
confrontation and conflict.
The letter
undertook the task of demolishing the arguments of the moderates. Often praised
for its moral philosophy, it is also a masterful work of strategic thinking. As sociologist
Jonathan Rieder observes in his new book on the letter, Gospel of Freedom,
King strikes a number of poses in it, swinging between “diplomatic” and
“prophetic” modes of address. But his overriding posture might be
termed one of mock moderation - that is, a stance that put pay to the thinking
of moderates by arguing against them in the very “patient and reasonable terms”
that they fetishized. Here and there ironic barbs and flashes of overt
indignation suggest the difficulties that King had in maintaining this stance.
Yet it was one well chosen for the audience he imagined.
Addressing the moderates' arguments
King began by
addressing the charge that he and the SCLC were “outside
agitators.” First, he met the charge on its face and noted that the SCLC had an
affiliation with a local civil rights organization, and that they
had been invited to Birmingham by this organization. But then King pointedly
called into question the very conception of insiders and outsiders in the face
of injustice. “I am in Birmingham because injustice exists here,” he said.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an
inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever
affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
King observed that the clergy had little to say about the conditions that occasioned the protest. King then turned
to the clergy's plea for negotiations rather than demonstrations. The local civil rights organization, he noted, had already had pursued desegregation
negotiations with Birmingham’s businessmen in the fall of 1962 and won an
agreement promising an end to Jim Crow in department store dressing rooms. But
the merchants had reneged on these promises. Direct action was thus not an
alternative to negotiations but an effort to force new, good faith negotiations.
Here King
articulated a crucial point about nonviolent direct action. Sit-ins, marches
and boycotts were not merely gestures of moral suasion but also exercises of
coercive force, a matter of “creating tension,” as King put it. “The purpose of
our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it
will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” Power and privilege are rarely
freely granted to others by those who possess them; they must be taken by means
of “pressure.” “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be
demanded by the oppressed.”
As for the
“untimeliness” of the protests, King simply noted that African-American
patience was not inexhaustible. “There comes a time when the cup of endurance
runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of
injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair.” Too often
counsels of patience from white people had been ill-disguised perpetual holding
actions. “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’”
But why break the
law? The clergy had indicted Wallace for proposing to do so, and now they
were registering the same indictment against King. What was the difference
between Wallace and King in this respect? How could King consistently demand
that southerners obey the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education while he
was violating the local injunction against demonstrations?
These questions
occasioned King’s defense of civil disobedience. There are, he said, just and
unjust laws. He urged obedience to the first and violation of the second. But
how then does one discern the difference? Here King’s
strategic genius was on full display. Rather than making a singular argument
for a distinction between just and unjust laws, he offered his readers a host
of grounds, both sacred and secular, for the distinction. Thereby he afforded
them the opportunity to choose the argument that most appealed to them, while
implying that he had covered all the conceivable bases.
Just and unjust laws
(1) An unjust law was at odd with God’s law, or natural law.
(2) Or, if one preferred a psychological approach, “Any law that uplifts the human
personality is just. Any law that degrades the human personality is unjust.”
Segregation damaged the personality of both parties to oppression. “It gives
the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of
inferiority.” It substituted an “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou”
relationship. Or one might lean on the Christian existentialism of Paul Tillich:
segregation was separation, and hence sin—an expression of humanity’s “awful
estrangement.”
(3) One might also
look for signs of injustice in the procedures by which laws were enacted or
enforced. “A law is unjust, for example, if a majority group compels a minority
group to obey the statute but does not make it binding on itself.” A law is
unjust if it is imposed on a minority that itself had no part in enacting the
law by electing the representatives who promulgated it. Lawmaking in a state
such as Alabama, in which in some counties African Americans constituted a
majority of the population but none of the registered voters, was inherently
suspect.
(4) Finally, some laws were just on their face but unjust in their
application. For a city to require a permit for holding a parade was not
inherently unjust, but an injunction that forbid parading as a means of denying
the right to peaceable assembly and free speech was unjust.
Civil disobedience
Civil
disobedience, King insisted, was civil disobedience, that is, it did not
evade the law as rabid segregationists advocated, but faced the full
consequences of breaking a law in order to make the case for changing that law.
“One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a
willingness to accept the penalty,” he averred. “I submit that an individual
who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts
the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community
over its injustice is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”
We'll be discussing Martin Luther King's letter (and his life's work) next Thursday, May 23.
For a book discussion
with Jonathan Rieder,
the author of Gospel of Freedom, go to:
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