Martin Luther King's letter from jail embodies the Christian story
National Post, 09 April 2023
On no day is it more evident that grave injustice can be wrought by law than Good Friday
“Never before have I written so long a letter,” wrote Martin Luther King sixty years ago this Easter. “I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?”
In April 1963, King went to Alabama to lead nonviolent action in one of America’s most fiercely segregated cities. He was arrested — protesting without a “permit” — in Birmingham on Good Friday and thrown in the city jail. He spent that Easter writing amidst the harsh conditions of the jail rather than preaching in his pulpit.
He wrote 6,900 words in his open letter, addressed to white Alabama clergymen who had published a “call to unity” which took issue with King’s involvement, tactics and timetable.
The Letter from Birmingham Jail was the most important written document of the civil rights movement, one of the most important texts in American political history, and of global importance in articulating why unjust laws are laws that call for civil disobedience.
Place and time gave it extraordinary credibility.
King was in jail, and began writing the letter in the margins of the newspaper and on scraps of paper. Eventually his lawyers were allowed to give him a legal pad on which he feverishly poured out his soul. What he wrote added to that essential corpus of literature — prison letters and diaries.
That it was written from Good Friday through Easter Sunday, and published a few days later, made it all the more powerful. King was jailed in accord with the law. But the law is not always just. The most famous trial in history was conducted in accord with the law, but the crucifixion of Jesus was not just. On no day is it more evident that grave injustice can be wrought by law than Good Friday.
King was first and foremost a preacher, a Christian pastor. His political protest followed from that. That is why he was cut deeply by fellow clergymen criticizing him for being an “outsider” who was stirring up trouble, instead of waiting for a supposedly more favourable time.
The Birmingham letter includes perhaps King’s most famous words, aside from the speech some months later at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington.
“I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham,” he replied to the “outsider” objection. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
King’s letter details in stark and soaring prose the searing, savage reality of segregation. He defends his approach and notes that, without protest, negotiation is often a stalling tactic of those protecting their power.
“I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure,” King explained. He recalls that no action he had ever led was thought “well-timed” by those upholding racist laws.
The legitimacy of those laws forms the heart of the letter, King’s moral, philosophical, political and legal explanation of why some laws ought not be obeyed.
“There are two types of laws: just and unjust,” King wrote. “I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all’.”
Continue reading at the National Post.