The Letter from Birmingham Jail

The cell is small and the light is wrong.

This is what King will say later, when he is asked what it was like. The cell is small and the light is wrong. The light is wrong because it is fluorescent and on twenty-four hours a day. The cell is in solitary because Bull Connor — Theophilus Eugene Connor, Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, the man whose fire hoses and German shepherds will shortly become the photographs that break the moral pretense of segregation — has decided that the most famous Black preacher in the country should not be allowed company.

It is Good Friday, April 12, 1963. He has been arrested for violating an injunction against demonstrations. He has been jailed before — this is his thirteenth arrest — but he has never been in solitary. He is allowed no phone call, initially. His lawyers cannot reach him. His wife Coretta, in Atlanta, has just given birth to their fourth child five days earlier and does not know whether he is alive.

She calls the White House. President Kennedy, alerted by Robert Kennedy, calls Birmingham. The phone privileges are restored. King is allowed to call Coretta. The conversation lasts a minute. He tells her he is alright. He does not tell her about the cell.

He has, by this point, started thinking.

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The thinking begins with a newspaper.

Someone — a guard, a sympathetic trustee, the historical record is not entirely clear — slips a copy of the Birmingham News into his cell on Tuesday, April 16. Inside the paper is reprinted an open letter that has been published the previous week by eight white Alabama clergymen. The letter is titled A Call for Unity. It is signed by Episcopal bishops, Methodist bishops, a Catholic bishop, a rabbi, and the moderator of the Presbyterian Synod of Alabama. It is, by the standards of southern white religious leadership in 1963, a moderate document. It does not defend segregation. It does not endorse Bull Connor.

It does, however, denounce the demonstrations.

The clergymen call King’s campaign unwise and untimely. They urge the Black community to negotiate quietly. They say that the proper place to address grievances is the courts. They say that nonviolent direct action by outsiders — meaning King, who has come from Atlanta — is provoking violence and ill-will and slowing the natural progress of racial reconciliation. They write the letter, in other words, from the position of the white moderate, and they send it to the Black demonstrators rather than to the police commissioner whose dogs are biting children.

King reads it on the cot.

What he does next is the act that produces the document. He picks up the newspaper. He picks up a pen — his lawyers have been allowed to bring him a pen on the second day. He begins to write in the margins of the newspaper itself, in the white space around the columns, around the advertisements, between the photographs. When he runs out of margin he writes between the lines. When he runs out of newspaper, his lawyer — Clarence Jones, future ghostwriter of the I Have a Dream speech — begins to bring him scraps of writing paper, which he hides in his coat and slips through the bars when the guards aren’t looking.

King writes for four days. The letter, when assembled, will be approximately seven thousand words. He writes it without notes. He cites Augustine, Aquinas, Tillich, Buber, Niebuhr, T.S. Eliot, John Bunyan, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Hebrew prophets, Paul, Socrates, the Boston Tea Party, the Hungarian freedom fighters of 1956, and the specific names of the men killed and the children injured in the previous month in Alabama. He cites them from memory.

The pen runs out twice. Jones brings new pens.

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The argument has six movements, and each one matters.

He begins by addressing the clergymen with respect. My Dear Fellow Clergymen, he writes — not Dear sirs, not To the editors, but fellow clergymen. He places himself, immediately, inside the religious community they share. He does not concede the moral high ground. He claims it. He is, he is reminding them, a Baptist preacher, the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher, with a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University. They are not the clergy talking down to him. They are colleagues whose theology he is about to dissect.

The first movement answers the charge of being an outsider. He addresses it by telling them that he is in Birmingham because he was invited — by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, Fred Shuttlesworth’s organization, an affiliate of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Then he widens the argument. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. He invokes Paul: just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. The argument is not merely political. It is apostolic.

The second movement explains why direct action was necessary. The clergymen had urged negotiation. King answers: there has been negotiation, for years, and the negotiations have produced nothing because the structure has no incentive to negotiate seriously when there is no pressure on it. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. The campaign in Birmingham is not a refusal of negotiation. It is the precondition for negotiation. Tension is not the opposite of justice. It is the prerequisite for it.

The third movement is the argument about just and unjust laws — the most philosophically demanding section of the letter, and the one that has been quoted in court briefs and theology seminars for sixty years.

He begins with Augustine: an unjust law is no law at all. He continues with Aquinas: an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. He cites Buber on the difference between an I-it relationship and an I-thou relationship — segregation, he argues, makes people into things, and is therefore I-it, and is therefore unjust. He cites Tillich on sin as separation, and argues that segregation is sin made statutory.

How does one know if a law is unjust? He provides three tests. First: an unjust law is one that a numerical or power majority compels a minority to obey but does not make binding on itself. Second: an unjust law is one inflicted on a minority that had no part in enacting it because they were denied the right to vote. Third: a law that is just on its face may be unjust in its application — as the parade ordinance under which he has been arrested was just in principle but applied unjustly to suppress First Amendment rights.

He concludes with the willingness to accept the consequences. 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 law.

This sentence will be quoted in Brown v. Board citations, in Supreme Court arguments, in seminary classrooms, and on the podia of every nonviolent movement that follows him. It is also, sitting on a cot in the Birmingham jail, what King is doing as he writes it. He is enacting the philosophy in the act of articulating it. The letter is its own demonstration.

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The fourth movement is the most painful section.

It is the rebuke of the white moderate. He does not soften it. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion, he writes, that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler 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 of direct action”; who paternalistically believes 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.”

This passage is aimed directly at the eight clergymen. It is also aimed at every white liberal in the United States who has been telling Black people to slow down, to be patient, to wait for the right time, to go through the proper channels. It is the most surgical section of the letter because it identifies, with theological precision, the specific moral failure of the people who consider themselves the friends of the cause.

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.

The clergymen, when they read this, understand what has happened. They are not being criticized as racists. They are being criticized as Christians. The criticism is more serious because it is more specific. They have failed in the office they hold. King is not asking them to become more progressive. He is asking them to become more Christian.

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The fifth movement is the rebuke of the church itself.

This is the section in which King’s voice cracks, on the page, into something close to grief. I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” He has watched, in the years of his ministry, the white church of the South stand on the sidelines or, more often, on the wrong side. He has watched white clergymen who consider themselves moderates fail to march, fail to preach, fail to risk the criticism of their congregations.

In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

He goes further. He invokes the early church. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. He calls the contemporary white church to remember what the church once was: not the chaplain of the prevailing order but its judge. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.

This is, on a Good Friday weekend, in a jail cell, a prophetic word delivered against the institution that ought to have been speaking it itself. King is the prophet to a church that has refused to be prophetic. The role reversal is itself the indictment.

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The sixth movement is the closing.

It is short. He has been writing for four days. The newspaper margins are full. The smuggled paper is full. He is tired. He brings the letter to its end with a phrase that has become, since 1963, almost a prayer.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

Martin Luther King Jr.

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The letter is smuggled out, page by page, by Clarence Jones and the other lawyers. It is reassembled at the Gaston Motel, where the SCLC has its headquarters in Birmingham. It is typed up. It is mimeographed. It is sent to the eight clergymen, none of whom respond directly. It is sent to The Christian Century and The Atlantic Monthly and Liberation, all of which publish it in slightly different forms over the next four months.

By August 1963, when King climbs the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to deliver the dream he has carried with him from Birmingham, the letter has been read by hundreds of thousands of Americans. By the time of his assassination in 1968, it is being taught in seminaries. By the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the Birmingham campaign in 2013, it is being taught in every law school in the country and every theology school. It has been translated into fifty languages.

The eight clergymen will be asked, for the rest of their lives, what they thought of the letter. Most of them will say, in interviews late in their lives, some version of the same answer: that they had not understood, at the time, what King was doing; that they had thought he was going too fast; that they had been wrong; that the letter, on rereading, had taught them something they had not been able to hear from the pulpits they themselves had occupied.

One of them, the Episcopal bishop George Murray, will say in 2002: He was right. We were wrong. There’s no way around it.

The cell is still there. The Birmingham city jail still stands. The cot is still in the cell, behind glass, with a small plaque. The plaque does not need to say much. It says where he was, and when he was there, and what he wrote on the newspaper that has become, almost without changing its words, the conscience of a country.