“Letter from Birmingham Jail”

by Martin Luther King, Jr.

THE LITERARY WORK

A letter written in April 1963 in the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama; irst published in pamphlet form in 1963.

SYNOPSIS

Arrested during demonstrations against racial segregation in Birmingham. King responds to a public statement by eight Birmingham clergymen challenging the demonstrations.

Events in History at the Time of the Letter

The Letter in Focus

For More Information

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–68) grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where his father was pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church. As King was fond of pointing out, religion ran strongly in the family; his grandfather and great grandfather had also been Baptist preachers. After studies at Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University (where he earned a Ph.D.), Dr. King himself became a pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954. In the late 1950s and early 1960s King emerged as the moral voice of the growing civil rights movement to overturn racial segregation in the South. The year 1963 became pivotal for the movement. In widely televised demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, that spring, King was arrested with others; after his release, he would lead peaceful protesters in facing violent crackdowns by white police. That summer King would go on to help lead thousands of civil rights demonstrators in the March on Washington, the climax of which was his famous “I Have a Dream” speech (also in Literature and Its Times) from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In contrast to the stirring emotional appeal of that speech, the earlier “Letter from Birmingham Jail” offers a restrained and carefully reasoned defense of the technique of civil disobedience, or nonviolent confrontation, that King was about to invoke.

Events in History at the Time of the Letter

Historical background: the long reign of Jim Crow

For three-quarters of a century after the end of Reconstruction—that is, from about 1880 to about 1955—African Americans made little progress in their long struggle for equal treatment in American society. Throughout much of America, blacks faced daily discrimination and segregation in schools, housing, and employment. In the South, however, where most blacks lived until the 1930s and 1940s, racial segregation was even more pervasive. Varieties of segregation were enshrined in the so-called Jim Crow laws, state and local laws that forbade mixing in public places and restricted black train passengers to a single car (usually grimy and half-filled with cargo). These laws reversed the Reconstruction era’s civil rights legislation and made official the South’s traditional separation between the races. The laws rested on the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld “separate but equal” facilities as constitutional. Under the Jim Crow system, blacks were legally denied service in many public facilities and businesses, which were designated as “White Only.” Meanwhile, from public schools and transportation to restaurants and shops, blacks in southern states were expected to settle for services that were harder to find and far lower in quality than those offered to whites, despite the law’s promise of “separate but equal.”

For decades only one major national organization opposed the Jim Crow system and other discriminatory laws and practices in the United States. Founded by black leader W.E.B. Du Bois and others in 1909, the National Organization for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) emphasized legal action in promoting equality for blacks. After years of challenging discrimination in test cases throughout the United States, in 1954 the NAACP achieved a breakthrough victory in the Supreme Court. The NAACP’s lawyers brought a lawsuit in support of Oliver Brown, whose daughter Linda had been denied entry into a white public school in Topeka, Kansas. In its 1954 ruling on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the Supreme Court held that separate educational facilities were by their very nature unequal, and that school segregation violates the United States Constitution. Yet despite this landmark decision, which essentially overturned Plessy v. Ferguson, southern state and local governments continued to enforce Jim Crow laws, in schools and elsewhere. Southern blacks did not suffer this violation of their rights silently, however. Even earlier, signs of protest suggested that at least some blacks refused to sit back and endure what Martin Luther King, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” would call “the disease of segregation” (King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” p. 83).

The civil rights movement

The first cracks in the wall of segregation came during and just after World War II (1939–45). Black leaders such as labor organizer A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) had long pointed out the valuable contributions of black soldiers and workers in defending a nation that accorded them only the status of second-class citizens. Only at Randolph’s repeated insistence did the federal government desegregate first the defense industries (1941) and then finally the armed forces (1948). Between these two victories came the founding of an organization whose philosophical approach would have a profound influence on future events. In 1942 an activist in Chicago, James Farmer, established the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which called on blacks and whites to use nonviolent direct action to resist all forms of racial discrimination. Based on techniques of civil disobedience developed by Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi and others, CORE’s methods would play a major role in shaping the civil rights movement, which would emerge to combat segregation in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The NAACP’s 1954 victory in Brown v. Board of Education can be thought of as the event that gave the major impetus to the civil rights movement. With segregation’s constitutionality called into question, blacks throughout the South were now emboldened to openly resist laws that both blacks and many liberal and moderate whites increasingly saw as unjust. Several sporadic protests occurred in southern cities in the early 1950s, but it was the historic act of one Montgomery, Alabama woman, Rosa Parks, that marked the beginning of effective opposition to segregation in 1955. A secretary at the local chapter of the NAACP, Rosa Parks boarded a Montgomery bus one day in December 1955 and sat in the so-called “neutral zone,” between the white section in the front and black section in the rear. Blacks were allowed to sit in the neutral zone, but were obliged under law to give up their seats to white passengers if needed. Technically the zone was reserved for blacks unless the white section was filled. On this day, when the driver demanded she give her seat to a younger white man, Rosa Parks refused. Actually the driver told her whole row to stand so the white man could sit without having to keep company with any black person in the row. The whole row refused, then relented, except for Parks. She was arrested and jailed.

Montgomery’s black leaders had already begun discussing ways of protesting segregation. This would make an ideal test case, they thought. When Rosa Parks was arrested, the community organized a one-day boycott of the bus company, the vast majority of whose riders were black. This temporary boycott was so successful that the organizers decided to extend it. Forming an organization they called the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), they chose as their leader and spokesman the energetic 25-year-old pastor of a prominent local church, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King had arrived in Montgomery only about a year earlier, moving from Boston with his wife Coretta to take up his first job, as pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. At the time of the boycott, his first child—a daughter, Yolanda—had just been born.

The Montgomery bus boycott lasted more than a year, nearly putting the bus company out of business. In late 1956, after King had been briefly jailed by city authorities and his house had been bombed by angry whites, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. The Montgomery bus boycott had succeeded, and Martin Luther King Jr. had risen to national prominence as a civil rights leader. Building on its Montgomery success, in 1957 the organization changed its name to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), reflecting both a new expanded regional approach to civil rights activism as well as a strong religious component.

With King still at the helm, the SCLC started affiliates in cities throughout the South, each under the supervision of a local black church leader. King’s approach, based on the tradition of civil disobedience already developed by Thoreau, Gandhi, and CORE, gained wide support, both among blacks and among liberal and moderate whites. In addition to targeting segregation, King and the SCLC turned their attention to voting rights, long denied to Southern blacks by white local and state governments. In the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” King refers to the “devious methods” used to stop Southern blacks from registering to vote (“Letter,” p. 86). These included discriminatory literacy tests and poll taxes. White officials repeatedly arrested King as he led blacks to register.

By the late 1950s, King’s strategy of nonviolent confrontation was attracting young people from around the country. In 1960 King’s associate, Ella J. Baker, helped a group of black and white young people form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). King encouraged SNCC to adopt the strategy of nonviolent tactics, and at first they obliged, coining a slogan borrowed from a speech he delivered to them—“jail not bail” (later many of them would abandon the nonviolent strategy). After students spontaneously began the “sit-in” movement to protest segregation in restaurants, this nonviolent method was taken up and expanded by SNCC. Purposefully remaining polite, the students

CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE

Civil disobedience has also been called “passive resistance,” but King preferred the term “nonviolent confrontation,” which stressed the idea of assertive action in opposing injustice. The tradition of civil disobedience has its roots in the thought of ancient writers such as Cicero (Roman, first century b.c.e.) and St. Augustine (Roman, fourth century c.e.), who distinguished between just and unjust laws. In the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” King quotes an idea of St. Augustine’s, which, along with his other ideas, provided the basis of Western Christian theology: “an unjust law is no law at all” (“Letter.” p. 84). The phrase itself comes from the influential essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849; also in Literature and its Times) by the American writer Henry David Thoreau (American, 1817–62), who argued that people have a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws. Such civil disobedience should he practiced openly and nonviolently, in order to stir the conscience of lawmakers and force a change in the law. Those practicing civil disobedience should be prepared to accept punishment for breaking the unjust law. “Under a government that imprisons any unjustly, ’ Thoreau wrote, “the true place for a just man is also a prison” (Thoreau in Oates, p. 86). While King does not quote Thoreau in the “Letter,” he studied Thoreau’s writings closely as a graduate student and found them deeply inspiring. He also found inspiration in the techniques of Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), who developed nonviolent methods of civil disobedience in resisting British colonial rule in India. Gandhi, who was likewise influenced by Thoreau. also stressed the importance of being ready to go to jail for the cause of justice.

would sit at “white only” lunch counters and refuse to get up. Harassed and often beaten by angry whites, thousands were arrested throughout the South. Across the nation, sit-ins forced the desegregation not only of restaurants but also of department stores, shops, libraries, and other facilities. Another tactic, tried earlier (1947) by black activists in CORE was the “Freedom Ride,” which entailed their sitting in any section of an interstate bus, a right confirmed by the Supreme Court (in Morgan v. Virginia, 1946). The year 1961 saw CORE begin a series of “Freedom Rides” that faced an even more violent backlash than the sit-ins had. Groups of blacks, who were joined later by sympathetic whites, sat where they wanted on interstate buses that traversed the South. When angry white mobs fire-bombed or attacked the buses, Southern police often stood by doing nothing or, in some cases, arrested the Freedom Riders. An estimated 70,000 Freedom Riders took part in these legal

BLACK RELIGIOUS TRADITION AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

In its earliest days, Christianity exerted a powerful attraction to slaves of the ancient Greco-Roman world, who made up a significant part of the church’s following in the days when Christians were a persecuted minority. Like their ancient counterparte newly arrived African slaves in the Americas also found comfort in Christian beliefs (among them, the belief in a better world to come). Exposed to Christianity by their white masters., slaves in the American South developed their own distinctive church traditions, incorporating African elements into the service. The energetic music of the so-called “Negro spirituals” enlivened services, as did the black preachers’ often impassioned sermons, featuring a type of call and response in which the audience would affirm “yes” or “amen” at key points is audiences at King’s speeches often did). A superb orator known for his powerful sermons. King fell strongly into step with the tradition of African American Christian worship. His generation of spiritual leaders differed from those before them, though. Whereas earlier generations had often comforted their audiences with the promise of justice in the next world. King’s generation turned increasingly to the pursuit of justice in this world. It is this generation that formed the backbone of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which played such a leading role in the civil rights movement.

and peaceful demonstrations, and nearly 4,000 of them were arrested.

Birmingham

One of the cities in which Freedom Riders were arrested was Birmingham, Alabama, the state’s largest city and leading industrial center. Located about 80 miles north of Montgomery, Birmingham was not just another segregated southern city. In King’s words, it was “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the country” (“Letter,” p. 79). A die-hard segregationist, the city’s Police Commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had vowed that “blood would run in the streets” before the city would desegregate (Connor in Oates, p. 212). Connor was the one who ordered his officers to arrest the Freedom Riders here. On the other side, doggedly pushing for desegregation was the colorful head of the SCLC’s Birmingham affiliate, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. In and out of jail since beginning demonstrations there in the late 1950s, harassed, beaten, his home bombed, and his wife stabbed during a street attack, Shuttlesworth doggedly tried to negotiate with city leaders. Though his efforts were repeatedly rebuffed, he was as determined to end segregation in Birmingham as Connor was to preserve it.

In early 1963 King and the SCLC were struggling to recover from a failed campaign the previous year to end segregation in Albany, Georgia. Responding to Shuttlesworth’s requests for a Birmingham campaign, King and his aides decided that the very strength of segregation in that city could work in their favor. If they could break segregation in Birmingham, they reasoned, the rest of the South would surely follow. Furthermore, they thought they had learned two important lessons from Albany. First, they would focus their efforts not on Birmingham’s political structure, but on its businesses, which relied heavily on black customers. Second, they realized that to be sure of results, they needed to provoke a reaction of such violence that federal intervention would be required to protect the demonstrators. Thus, they deliberately planned a campaign of provocation by breaking the city’s segregation ordinances, such as the one against sitting at “whites only” lunch counters. By marching and demonstrating, they would induce the police to arrest them for violating ordinances like the one against parading without a permit. A nonviolent but provocative demonstrator, King reasoned, “would force his oppressor to commit his brutality openly—in the light of day—with the world looking on” through the lenses of media photographers and television cameras (King in Oates, p. 212). In their communications, the SCLC called the Birmingham campaign Project C, for Confrontation.

King announced the SCLC’s Birmingham campaign in January 1963, and arrived with his staff in the city in February. The campaign itself was scheduled to begin in early March and to peak around Easter, normally the year’s second-busiest shopping time. However, the city’s may-oral election was to be held on March 5, with “Bull” Connor facing a more moderate candidate named Albert Boutwell. Fearing that the campaign would propel Connor to office, King delayed the start for several weeks. He was then forced to delay again when an indecisive election forced a run-off between Connor and Boutwell. Meanwhile, on March 28, Coretta King gave birth to a daughter, Bernice, the couple’s fourth child.

On April 2 Boutwell won the run-off election by a wide margin, and the next day the SCLC kicked off its campaign. Issuing a “Birmingham Manifesto,” King called for desegregation in some facilities downtown and demanded that a biracial committee be established to formulate a timetable for desegregating the city’s remaining services. The statement informed local business that demonstrations and boycotts by black customers—up to 40 percent of the city’s population—would go on until the city met the demands.

From the beginning, the campaign faced criticism, not just from segregationists but also from many who opposed segregation. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, brother of the President, summed up much liberal and moderate reaction nationwide: the campaign was badly timed, he declared, and the moderate Boutwell should be given a chance. Boutwell himself—who as King points out in the “Letter” was a committed segregationist—condemned the demonstrators and the SCLC staff as trouble-making outsiders, a commonly heard charge echoed even by some Birmingham blacks.

On April 11, the Birmingham sheriff served King with a court injunction prohibiting King and other SCLC officers from participating in any demonstrations. At a press conference the next day, Thursday, April 12, King announced his intention to disobey the injunction by leading a march the following day, April 13, Good Friday. That night, King was shaken to hear that, after weeks of sit-ins, the SCLC had run out of money to post bond for its jailed personnel. His aides argued that King was needed out of jail, in order to raise money. If King went to jail, they said, the entire campaign would fail for lack of funds. After long thought, King resolved to march and go to jail, trusting God for the needed cash. The following day, Good Friday, King and about 50 other demonstrators were indeed arrested and

WHITE SOUTHERN REACTIONS TO CIVIL RIGHTS DEMONSTRATORS

As King was aware, media exposure of southern white hatred and violence towards blacks was capable of arousing strong disgust with the white behavior among northerners. White moderates and liberals in the North would not long tolerate such racism once the ugly picture of it was brought into their homes and offices. In the weeks after King’s release from the Birmingham city jail, images of peaceful demonstrators being beaten, subjected to punishing jets of water from fire hoses, and mangled by police dogs assailed northern liberals in newspapers and on television, affecting viewers in ways that proved this hope to have been well founded. These powerful pictures of nonviolent protestors being savagely attacked helped turn the Birmingham campaign from a near failure to a resounding success.

taken downtown to the Birmingham City Jail. King was placed in solitary confinement, where he would remain for one week, until he was released on bail Saturday, April 20.

King went through bouts of loneliness and depression in jail, punctuated only by visits from his lawyers. The lawyers brought good news on Monday: black singer and actor Harry Belafonte had offered to guarantee any money needed for bonds. The following day, however, King was dismayed by the contents of a four-day-old Birmingham newspaper that his lawyers brought him to read. The paper contained an open letter

EXCERPTS FROM THE LETTER OF THE EIGHT WHITE CLERGYMEN

“We the undersigned clergymen are among those who, in January, issued “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense,” in dealing with racial problems in Alabama. We expressed understanding that honest convictions in racial matters could properly be pursued in the courts, but urged that decisions of those courts should in the meantime be peacefully obeyed…. In Birmingham, recent public events have given indication that we all have opportunity for a new constructive and realistic approach to racial problems. However, we are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens, directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely…. Just as we formerly pointed out that “hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions,” we also point out that such actions as incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful actions may be [sic], have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems. We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham…. When rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets. We appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.”

Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter, Bishop Joseph A. Durcki, Rabbi Hilton L. Grafman, Bishop Holan B. Harmon, Reverend George M. Murray, Reverend Edward V. Ramage, Reverend Earl Stallings (Garrow, vol. 1, p. 860).

against the demonstrations signed by eight white Alabama clergymen, Christian and Jewish, some of whom were on record as anti-segregationists. The letter made the same arguments King had heard already from many moderates. The demonstrations were badly timed, they were led by outsiders, and they incited violence, the clerics declared. In the name of racial harmony, they called for law and order, exhorting the city’s blacks to be patient and to negotiate rather than resort to breaking the law. Nowhere did they child southern racists for the recent beatings and bombings of demonstrators or the ongoing segregation that denied blacks their basic rights. Just two weeks later Birmingham police would unleash high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs on the demonstrators. Then came night bombings, the violence spiraling out of control, addressed on television by President John F. Kennedy, who sent 3,000 federal troops to the city. In his reply to the clerics, King sought to avert all this mayhem.

Scribbling feverishly on the newspaper’s margins, on scraps of toilet paper, and finally on notepads that his lawyers were permitted to bring him, King composed his reply.

The Letter in Focus

The contents

King begins his response to the eight elergymen in a tone of respect that he maintains throughout the work. Although he rarely answers “criticisms of my work and ideas,” he writes, he is taking time to do so “while confined here in the Birmingham city jail” because “I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth” (“Letter,” p. 77).

The first criticism King addresses is the clergymen’s characterization of him and the SCLC as outsiders. On a superficial level, he asserts, he has “organizational ties” to Birmingham through the local SCLC affiliate, at the invitation of which he has come to the city. On a deeper level, however, King argues, he is “in Birmingham because injustice is here” (“Letter,” p. 78). Like St. Paul, who “carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town” (“Letter,” p. 78). Contending that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King declares that “whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly” (“Letter,” p. 79). Consequently, he concludes, no American can be considered an outsider anywhere within the nation’s borders.

Responding to the clergymen’s call for negotiation, King points out that earlier attempts by local black leaders to negotiate with the city were rebuffed. Negotiation with the city’s merchants resulted only in broken promises, as “the stores’ humiliating racial signs” remained in place despite the merchants’ agreements to remove them (“Letter,” p. 80). King agrees that food-faith negotiation is indeed desirable: “The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation” (“Letter,” p. 82).

In a similar vein, King responds to the charge that the action is “untimely” by stating that he has never engaged in a campaign that whites thought was “well timed”: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed…. For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ears of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ’Never’” (“Letter,” pp. 82–83).

King then catalogues racism’s cruelties and inequities in a long paragraph marked by parallel constructions:

When you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society… then you will understand why we find if difficult society.

(“Letter,” p. 83)

He concludes this thundering litany with a mild and almost ironically polite request: “I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience” (“Letter,” p. 84).

Answering the objection that the demonstrators are breaking the law, King cites religious authorities such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas in distinguishing between just and unjust laws. While we have an obligation to obey just laws, he argues, we have an equal obligation to disobey unjust ones. King sharply contrasts regular criminals who arbitrarily disobey just laws with demonstrators whose principles drive them to disobey unjust ones. As an example of just laws, he refers to the recent Supreme Court decisions overturning segregation:

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. 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.

(“Letter,” p. 86)

King devotes much of the rest of the letter to voicing “two honest confessions” of disappointment (“Letter,” p. 87). His first disappointment is with the white moderates, whom he says almost present more of an obstacle to progress in civil rights than the strongest racists. Preferring “order” to “justice,” such moderates assume that “they can set the timetable for another man’s freedom” (“Letter,” p. 87). Order without justice merely gives the illusion of peace, King contends: the true source of Birmingham’s tension is not the demonstrators, but segregation itself. The demonstrators “merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive” (“Letter,” p. 88). To say that the demonstrators are causing the violence, King argues, is like “condemning a robbed man because his possession of money” led him to be robbed (“Letter,” p. 88).

King’s “other major disappointment” is with “the white church and its leadership” (“Letter,” p. 93). Too often, King declares, the South’s white religious leaders have either opposed the civil rights movement outright or else they have been “more cautious than courageous and remained silent” (“Letter,” p. 94). He contrasts this behavior with the rigorous moral courage and fearless sacrifice of early Christians—who were themselves often condemned as “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators” (“Letter,” p. 96). If the church remains a complacent “archdefender of the status quo,” King warns, people will dismiss it “as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century” (“Letter,” p. 96).

King expresses optimism about the civil rights movement’s ultimate success, linking the movement with the same ideals of freedom that reside in America’s most cherished traditions. In closing, King hails his fellow clergymen. He hopes that “the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away,” leaving “the radiant stars of love and brotherhood” to “shine over our nation with all their scintillating beauty” (“Letter,” p. 100).

King’s middle road between passivity and anger

One aspect of the white clergymen’s letter that King particularly objects to is their characterization of the demonstrations as “extreme.” Very much to the contrary, King defines his position and goals as centrist: “I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community” (“Letter,” p. 90). On one side are those “who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect” that “they have adjusted to segregation,” while on the other side are those consumed by “bitterness and hatred,” who come “perilously close to advocating violence” (“Letter,” p. 90). As an example of the latter, King cites black nationalist organizations such as the Nation of Islam:

Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

(“Letter,” p. 90)

Without the constructive outlet for black resentment offered by nonviolent protest, King suggests, “by now many streets of the South would… be flowing with blood” (“Letter,” p. 91). King furthermore foresees that if moderate whites continue to reject blacks’ nonviolent efforts at reform, “millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies—a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare” (“Letter,” p. 91). If blacks cannot win freedom through nonviolence, he warns, “they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat, but a fact of history” (“Letter,” p. 91).

By 1963 a potent rival to nonviolence had indeed emerged in growing militant movements, like the Nation of Islam, that sanctioned violent responses to white oppression. Disparaging the Birmingham campaign as “an exercise in futility,” the Nation of Islam’s fiery spokesman Malcolm X derided the goal of desegregation: “a chance to sit at a lunch counter and drink coffee with a cracker—that’s success?” (Malcolm X in Oates, pp. 252–53). Arguing that nonviolence left blacks defenseless, Malcolm X called King “a traitor to the Negro people” (Malcolm X in Branch, Pillar of Fire, p. 13). After Birmingham, as King was in the middle of an otherwise triumphant tour across the country, Malcolm X’s angry followers would pelt King’s car with rotten eggs in Harlem, New York City’s black ghetto. In such northern slums, racism and economic oppression were reflected in practice but not in law. Overturning entrenched practices in the North would prove far more complex than overturning local laws in the South. As the African American battle for social equality shifted north after the mid-1960s, nonviolence would face greater challenges than ever in winning their support.

Sources

While in jail, King had no access to books or any other literary material other than a few newspapers. However, in composing the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” he was able to draw on his extensive past reading. In the text he refers to both secular and religious writers, occasionally quoting from memory. He quotes secular writings by Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and T. S. Eliot, but the vast majority of his references are to religious works, either scriptural or theological. One of the white clergymen was a rabbi, and King refers to the Jewish theologian Martin Buber and incorporates quotations from Old Testament prophets such as Amos into his argument. The Christian writers on which he draws include St. Augustine (Roman, fourth century), St. Thomas Aquinas (Italian, thirteenth century), John Bunyan (English, seventeenth century), and Paul Tillich (American, twentieth century). Tillich, a leading modern Christian theologian, was a major influence on King’s graduate studies (as were the ideas on civil disobedience of Thoreau, Gandhi, and others discussed above).

However, the first Christian writer King names is the one who stands out as the predominant inspiration for King’s letter: St. Paul of Tarsus, known as the Apostle to the Gentiles. Paul’s own letters are an important element of the New Testament, and King explicitly compares himself to Paul in being “compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my home town” (“Letter,” p. 78). As critic Malinda Snow has observed, King’s choice of model was especially appropriate considering the audience he addresses himself to in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Paul did not write his New Testament letters to convert non-Christians, but to strengthen the faith of those already converted. Likewise, in the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” King aims not to change the minds of segregationists, but to instruct those, like the eight clergymen, who oppose segregation but lack the resolve or the vision to embrace the implications of that conviction.

Publication and impact

After King’s lawyers smuggled out the motley scraps of paper that comprised the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” his aides typed it up at a nearby motel. Wyatt Walker, a leading SCLC official, gave it the title by which it is still known. Walker predicted, “This is going to be one of the historic documents of this movement” (Walker in Oates, p. 230). While Walker’s expectation would eventually be borne out, the letter received little attention at first. Instead, the nation’s attention was focused on events in Birmingham itself. Despite an air of discouragement as King entered jail, the demonstrations in Birmingham did, after his release, finally succeed in arousing the conscience of the nation. Now seen as a major turning point in the civil rights movement, the Birmingham campaign is credited with much of the success of the March on Washington later that year. It is also believed to have contributed to the passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, as well as the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

First published as a pamphlet in 1963 by a Quaker organization, the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” also appeared that year in several religious and progressive journals. While it evoked no public response from the white clergymen it is addressed to, it did slowly find a growing readership in churches and among moderate politicians (such as Robert Kennedy) in Washington. It was largely ignored by the mainstream media until excerpts appeared in Time magazine in January 1964, whose own position had been far from neutral during the Birmingham demonstrations. Along with The New York Times, the magazine had echoed the white clergymen in condemning the Birmingham demonstrations as untimely and inflammatory.

That same year the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was included as a separate chapter in King’s book Why We Can’t Wait (1964), and since then it has been widely acknowledged as the most concise and powerful statement of his ideas. Historian and King biographer Stephen Oates calls it “a classic in protest literature, the most eloquent and learned expression of the goals and philosophy of the nonviolent movement ever written” (Oates, p. 230). Looking back on events and their relation to the letter, historian Taylor Branch points out the irony of its early obscurity:

In hindsight, it appeared that King had rescued the beleaguered Birmingham movement with his pen, but the reverse was true: unexpected miracles of the Birmingham movement with transformed King’s letter from a silent cry of desperate hope to a famous pronouncement of moral triumph.

(Branch, Parting the Waters, p. 744)

—Colin Wells

For More Information

Blumberg, Rhoda Lois. Civil Rights: The 1960s Freedom Struggle. Boston: Twayne, 1991.

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

———.Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Fairclough, Adam. To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.

Findlay, James F., Jr. Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Garrow, David, ed. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Civil Rights Leader, Theologian, Orator. 3 vols. Brooklyn: Carlson, 1989.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.

Oates, Stephen B. Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.