Martin Luther King wrote one of the most celebrated texts of the civil rights era on scraps of paper in a jail cell. Few texts frame the tension between law and justice as sharply.
King had been arrested in Birmingham, Alabama, on Good Friday 1963, after leading a demonstration in defiance of a court injunction. He spent the following week composing his response on whatever paper he could find. His lawyers carried the notes out for a secretary to type, and drafts went back to King for revision before the letter reached its final form.
What provoked the letter
King was answering eight white clergymen. In January 1963 they had published a statement urging white people to take their complaints to court rather than protest in the street. Three months later, with King’s demonstrations under way, the same clergymen wrote again. They called the protests “unwise and untimely” and argued that Birmingham’s problems were a matter for local people to work out among themselves, not outsiders.
King had considered making this argument before. The previous year, jailed in Albany, Georgia, he had been asked for a letter by the New York Albany News. Before that, he had thought about publicly rebuking white moderate clergy in the South. In Birmingham, facing that same criticism directly, he wrote it.
The argument the letter makes
The letter’s central move is to reject the idea that an outsider has no standing to object to a local injustice. King wrote that he was in Birmingham because “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” He also pointed out that his organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had a Birmingham affiliate, and that its head, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, had invited him to the city.
King then turned the clergymen’s own language against them. They had praised the restraint of Birmingham’s police, even as King’s letter catalogued what officers had done to jailed protesters, including a refusal to feed prisoners who wanted to sing grace together. Where the clergymen called the protests extreme, King accepted the label. He asked what kind of extremist a person should be, listing Jesus as “an extremist for love” and the apostle Paul as “an extremist for the Christian gospel.”
The letter’s sharpest target was not the segregationist but the moderate. King wrote that the “great stumbling block” toward freedom was not the Ku Klux Klan but the white moderate, someone who prized “order” over justice and who backed the goal while rejecting the method of getting there.
Why Birmingham, and why it worked
King had chosen Birmingham for a reason. The city had not desegregated any of its public facilities, and King calculated that a confrontation there, broadcast on television, would pressure the federal government to act on civil rights. The first arrests, including King’s own, drew only limited coverage. The national news came later, from the protests that followed. Those were led by school and college students, and met by police dogs and fire hoses ordered in by the city’s Commissioner for Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor.
After that publicity, President John F Kennedy intervened and promised new civil rights legislation. The letter did something separate. It set out the campaign’s case in writing, and jurists went on to critique it. Lewis Powell, a future Supreme Court justice, answered it in 1966 with “A Lawyer Looks at Civil Disobedience”.
What Birmingham won
Kennedy sent representatives to Birmingham to broker an agreement between city leaders and the campaigners. More than 1,000 children had been arrested by then. In the end the mayor agreed to some desegregation, and other southern cities followed. Segregation still went on in many parts of life in Birmingham.
The promise of a new law outlasted the protests. Civil rights groups planned the March on Washington of August 28, 1963, to hold Kennedy to it.
