"LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL"

 “LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL”

Sixty years ago this month, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Ralph Abernathy, and others were arrested in Birmingham.  They were leading protests in Birmingham in April, 1963.  City leaders obtained a state court injunction telling King and Abernathy and others not to continue their demonstrations and protests for basic human rights in Birmingham.  King responded to the court injunction with these words:  “ We cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunction, which is an unjust, undemocratic, and unconstitutional misuse of the legal process.”  Complicating this situation was the fact that SCLC was out of bail funds, and they could not guarantee bail funds for themselves or for anyone else who was arrested in the cause.  King was one of their main fundraisers, and if he went to jail, funding might dry up.  Harry Belafonte, Stanley Levison, and others went to work to raise the funds.

After much internal and external debate, King and Abernathy decided to demonstrate and to get arrested.  They were arrested on Good Friday, April 12, 1963, and King was placed into solitary confinement.  While he was there, he read a letter from eight moderate white pastors in Birmingham, sent to him and the other leaders of SCLC.  It was published in the Birmingham News, and it urged King and SCLC to stand down from the demonstrations, in order to give the moderate white leaders time to work things out and to move Birmingham in a more progressive direction.  During his time in jail, King responded with “The Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” He wrote it on the edges of the very Birmingham News newspaper in which the letter asking him to stand down had been published.  

King’s “Letter” has become a classic of American documents and of Christian documents worldwide.  If you have not read it lately, please take time to do it this week, the week of its being written 60 years ago.  It was first published in Jet Magazine in May, 1963, and it began to set the moderate and liberal white world on fire.  

Here are the opening paragraph of his Letter, and a quote from it midway through.  They should whet your appetite to read the entire Letter.

“While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling our present activities ‘unwise and untimely.”  Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas…..But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will, and your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I would like to answer your statement……

“My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.  History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.  Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor;  it must be demanded by the oppressed.  Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was “well-timed,” according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.  For years now, I have heard the word “Wait!”  It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity.  This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.”

Is this Letter only a relic from 60 years ago, dusted off as a testimony to the great work of the past?  Is this Letter only a reminder of how complicit people classified as “white” were in the development and sustenance of neo-slavery?  This Letter qualifies as both of those, but it is also a letter addressed to those of us classified as “white” in the 21st century in 2023.  In these crazy days, it is also a reminder of the growing number of Black “white supremacists” who become apologists for the rising tide of racism that is crying out for a return to a time when everyone agreed that white supremacy is God’s way and nature’s way. 

     If you have not read it in 2023, please do so this week and ask yourself:  what would Dr. King say today to those of us who are classified as “white?”  What is he saying to me in this letter?  Let us find ourselves in this Letter, and in this anniversary month of both King’s Letter and his assassination 5 years later.  Let us pledge ourselves to the streets and to the courthouses and statehouses to work for human rights, as this Letter so powerfully calls us to do.