Dr. King in Birmingham

King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and the events of Birmingham in 1963 shaped both King's life and that of the Civil Rights Movement

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson scratched across the pages of history the majestic word of the Declaration of Independence, we were here …If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands …”

At once defiant and hopeful, Martin Luther King Jr. penned these words from the confines of a Birmingham jail cell on April 16, 1963. King had been arrested days earlier when he came to Birmingham for a desegregation campaign, and he addressed this letter to eight of Alabama’s most prominent clergymen. King’s letter was a stirring retort to his critics. A trained seminarian and preacher, King deployed the language of the Bible and the tropes of American exceptionalism to defend the actions of his fellow protesters. As King observed :

“Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of police brutality is widely known. Its unjust treatment of Negroes in the courts is a notorious reality. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in this nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.”

In the letter, King also expounded upon the power of non-violent resistance and he famously questioned the role of white moderates and scoffing at ‘now is not the time’ admonitions. As King lamented:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods”; who paternistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. . . .

While the New York Times refused to print the letter, the now iconic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was eventually published in the widely read Christian Century as well as the Atlantic Monthly. Although the letter seared and excoriated, King drew upon more than simply his fury in his righteous denunciation of Bull Connor’s Birmingham. King was saddened more than anything else. He believed religious leaders had a moral obligation to speak out against any injustice, and King was particularly enraged by the idea that any cleric would, wittingly or not, aid and abet racism.

In his masterful, must read new biography, “King: A Life,” the author Jonathan Eig argues that the letter, “written at a decisive moment in his leadership, written without access to his bookshelf and without the help of his frequent collaborators, would become his most passionate and lasting prose.” But beyond his formidable intellectual gifts, King was able to draw on his bone deep theological underpinnings to use the letter as a proverbial pulpit. As Eig explains:

“He called upon the Apostle Paul, who had written his own letters from jail, and the Hebrew prophets such as Jeremiah and Amos. Perhaps most of all he called upon his predecessors in the Black church, including his grandfather, his father, and Vernon Johns, who combined protest and prophecy. Going to jail inspired King to preach and protest, to write with a fervor that seldom appeared in his prose, and in the process, to redefine American religious leadership.”

“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was inarguably a benchmark in the trajectory of the civil rights movement, and any history of the era which fails to note its impact would be incomplete. As Eig beautifully writes of the letter:

“The letter would become part of American history, a blistering, beautiful treatise on the moral obligation to fight oppression, a document that captured the spirit of the civil rights movement and the fierce brilliance of its leader. The letter showed the power King had discovered by leading a mass movement of Black Americans to join the mainstream of American life, and at the same time, to reshape mainstream American life. It captured the essence of his beliefs and aspirations.” But it had no immediate impact in Birmingham.”

However, it would take the discomfiting photos blasted across the front pages of newspapers nationwide of German Shepherds attacking Black teenagers and fire hoses deluging young children to imprint King’s message on the minds of Americans everywhere. The publicity from the large protests would reach critical mass, and the concerted efforts of civil rights organizers and protesters would lead not only to the beginning of desegregation in Birmingham, but a release of many of those unjustly jailed while marching with King.

But central to King’s thinking was the way in which racism was less a southern, regional matter than a deeply ingrained national scourge. In inveighing against “white moderates” in his letter, King was taking direct aim at NIMBY (not in my backyard) northern liberals who gave time and money to the civil rights reforms of the South while resisting change in their own hometowns of New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. Eig quotes the fabled syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann when we writes “The cause of desegregation must cease to be a Negro movement, blessed by white politicians from the Northern states. It must become a national movement to enforce national laws, led and directed by the National Government.”

King was nothing if not a prophet in his own right. He foresaw the mechanisms by which de jure segregation that pervaded the Jim Crow South could operate as de facto racism nationwide, if not met with the fiercest resistance. When Alabama Governor George Wallace barred the doors at the University of Alabama to stop two Black students from enrolling, he inadvertently paved the way for a national push (yet again) for civil rights legislation. (Going back to Reconstruction and into the 20th century, civil rights bills of one type or another were introduced in Congress only to die in committee or at the hands of the filibuster by Southern segregationist Democrats.) That day’s racial strife in Tuscaloosa led to President Kennedy’s federalizing of the National Guard and culminated in a presidential address that evening where he asked whether or not :

“We have a right to expect that the Negro community will be responsible, will, uphold the law, but they have a right to expect that the law will be fair, that the Constitution will be color blind, as Justice Harlan said at the turn of the century. This is what we are talking about and this is a matter which concerns this country and what it stands for, and in meeting it I ask the support of all of our citizens.”

Kennedy would be assassinated in November of 1963, but his push for a national civil rights bill would lay the groundwork for the eventual Civil Rights Bill of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Fair Housing Act of 1968, all passed by his successor Lyndon Johnson. A nation seemed at last ready, if still divided, for meaningful and substantive change. Senate Republican Leader Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, who helped shepherd the bill on the Senate floor, would quote Victor Hugo in declaring “Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come.”

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday this year, a holiday only 38 years old and one that took 15 years from King’s assassination in Memphis to federal enactment, there is no mistaking the galvanic power of the events of Birmingham in 1963. Eig’s book, while published last year, is nonetheless an evergreen read and one that reminds us that even heroically haloed figures like King are neither sinner nor saint. History is made by real people, and is shaped by real events. But it is the fortune, and in many cases, misfortune of circumstance, which forever shapes how we remember the past. Still, King’s life, cut short at only 39, was inalterably changed in the racist thicket that was Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. Eig records King’s thoughts a year after JFK’s televised speech on race relations:

Well, I think Birmingham did it … Birmingham created such a crisis in race relations that it …could no longer be ignored. And I’m sure that, as the president faced … the terrible brutality and inhumanity of a Bull Connor and all that went along with him, he came to see in a way that he had probably never seen—and in a way that many other people finally came to see–that segregation was morally wrong and it did something to the souls of both the segregator and the segregated. ”