Oh Boy, Another White Writer Is Going To Try Their Hand at Talking About MLK, Jr.
Specifically, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", so get your popcorn ready
I hope you can tell from the title that I do not take lightly the subject or context of this piece. I am not from the United States. I am not Christian. My family line in Canada goes back to the birth of the first white child (at least, by one account) in the region, and my lineage of white settlers—French, Scottish, Irish, British—is as marked by its own run of working-class hardships (large broods started by young teens, lots of infant and maternal mortality, hard periods for labourers) as it is not marked by the added cruelties of formal, racialized slavery and its weaponized legal offshoots.
But that’s why I want to talk about one of the most moving and oft-quoted speakers in the last century of Western canon, the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.—because other folks from backgrounds like mine have a tendency to quote Dr. King in times of struggle, and have certainly done so in this last, awful week after the US Presidential Election. And to them, with great love, I want to suggest the following:
Knock it off.
Or perhaps, to be a touch more generous about it:
Go deeper, if you must.
In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, for instance, we find choice excerpts like,
I must confess that over the past 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 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.” 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.
And,
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice.
But these formations of Dr. King’s words aren’t the sort that we usually share through online posts and memes. Instead, we prefer de-contextualized excerpts like:
Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.
And,
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.
Granted, these versions fit better into meme templates, but they can also de-fang the original message—or worse, be distorted to exactly the opposite effect, creating a sense of affirmation instead of motivation for change. Yes, we should be reaching for insights from other eras and contexts—but sometimes, the words themselves aren’t enough. It’s one thing to quote what an inspiring person said at one point in their journey; it’s another entirely to use such quotes to challenge ourselves to grow.
Which use-cases do you lean towards, on the whole?
Twisted words from a tough context
Dr. King’s letter was first distributed in mimeographed copies, then published as a pamphlet by the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers), before making its way into The Christian Century, Christianity in Crisis, New York Post, Ebony, and The Financial Post from June through July. It was also read in part in US Congress by Representative William Fitts Ryan (D-NY), and entered into the Congressional Record.
In this letter, Dr. King discussed his justification for being in Birmingham at all (some had suggested that outside agitators were unduly causing local strife), and why the principles of nonviolent resistance were necessary. He drew on both secular and religious discourse to argue for the moral imperative of struggle, but even though some outlets for this text were secular, the letter was centrally addressing white clergy. Specifically, he was responding to Birmingham clergymen who’d published a statement in the Birmingham News, which he’d read while sitting in jail in April 1963.
The path to Dr. King’s imprisonment has many beginnings, but if we simply focus on the preceding months, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) had planned a direct action campaign for March, to confront institutional segregation in Birmingham. This campaign was postponed a few weeks because of a fierce political contest to defeat Eugene “Bull” Connor, a pro-segregationist commission running for mayor. On April 2, he lost to Albert Boutwell—but not without a nasty fight that had him holding down his office in the US’s “most segregated city” for another month.
This election would be leveraged against the protesters, as if it were their fault that Connor refused to leave office. On April 3, the desegregation campaign started in earnest with mass meetings, sit-ins at lunch counters and libraries, kneel-ins at churches, marches on City Hall, voter drives, and a boycott of local merchants during a critical Easter season. And Connor used the existence of these protests as further excuse to retain control over the police and fire departments.
Why all the fuss?, some argued, while blaming the protesters for this state of affairs. You got your guy in Boutwell! You should just wait for Connor to leave office peacefully, then see if Boutwell brings about an end to segregation in his own way and time. Instead, all your public stunts are just making the political situation worse!
Hundreds were arrested under Connor’s continued grip on local governance, and on April 10 the city government secured an injunction against future protests. Campaign leaders deliberated about whether or not to follow the law before deciding, as Dr. King said, that “[w]e cannot in all good conscience obey such an injunction which is an unjust, undemocratic and unconstitutional misuse of the legal process.” Dr. King then went one further; he and Ralph Abernathy were important faces in the movement, and Dr. King was an excellent fundraiser for the cause, but if they kept themselves above the fray, away from being arrested alongside the others, they would simply be politicians, getting others to suffer in their stead. This, they chose not to do.
April 12 was Good Friday, so the arrest of Dr. King that day—as a deeply spiritual man, and as a strong advocate for justice from his Christian background—would forever entrench his actions within a much longer tradition of struggle. Upon arrest, he was placed in solitary confinement, which added to the narrative power of his actions: so dangerous a man was he, with the force of his ideas and his convictions, that he could not be left among the rabble, where he could continue to do that work!
Except that he wasn’t entirely disconnected from the world—couldn’t be, as a major leader and symbol of the movement—and so, he was able to read the papers, and write his response on April 16 to the “Christian” message left in one. The United Auto Workers then paid Dr. King’s $160,000 bail, and he was released on April 20.
The protests continued, and over a thousand African American students marched on May 2, leading to more arrests. The next day, though, Connor snapped, and ordered more violent actions from police and firefighters. In the coming days, the media would be flooded with images of young people—children, too—being clubbed, attacked by police dogs, and blasted by high-pressure fire hoses. As Dr. King wrote to their parents: “Don’t worry about your children, they’re going to be alright. Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail. For they are doing a job for not only themselves, but for all of America and for all mankind.” Those images certainly raised national horror and outrage, and a call for national intervention in Birmingham, Alabama.
Soon Dr. King and Abernathy, among other Black negotiators, met with chief civil rights assistant Burke Marshall, sent by John F. Kennedy’s administration. (Not without internal dissent, mind you: ACMHR founder Fred Shuttlesworth was furious about not being consulted on these negotiations, and he wasn’t on board with this strategy until the bitter end.) On May 10, a compromise was struck, offering concessions that related to the removal of Whites Only signage, the desegregation of lunch counters, and items of relevance to Black employment, the release of protesters, and the creation of a biracial committee to pursue further progress. In two weeks, the Alabama Supreme Court would order Connor and his city commissioners to vacate the offices they’d been holding hostage since the election—though Connor would land on his feet, as president for the Alabama Public Service Commission until 1972.
Segregationists reacted with violence, almost immediately after the agreement was struck between protesters and government negotiators. Explosives went off near the places where Dr. King, SCLC leaders, and Dr. King’s brother resided. 3,000 federal troops were launched by President John F. Kennedy, but these wouldn’t stop the surge of retaliatory action in the coming months. On August 28, Dr. King issued his famous “I Have A Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. But back in Birmingham, on September 15, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls: Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Rosamond Robertson, and Cynthia Dionne Wesley. Three of these girls were just months older than my father, and one a little younger than him. They might all still be alive today, if not for what happened because segregationists could not stand any progress. That’s how recent this “history” still is.
Dr. King’s letter was written in April, but its most prominent publications came after the negotiated agreement, and after the first wave of segregationist violence, in that dizzying summer of change before his famous march and the infamous bombing on September 15. This context casts the letter’s reflection on nonviolent protest in quite a different light: nonviolence had worked for their movement, but its efficacy had also yielded a sharp reminder of what actual violence looks like—from the police, and from other racist extremists protected by mainstream US society.
When Dr. King first crafted his letter, in response to eight white clergymen who regarded April’s nonviolent protest as “unwise and untimely”, he had already been disappointed by others—at Montgomery, a little over seven years prior, when only one white clergyman (the head of a Black Lutheran assembly) stood with him in his bus boycott. So when Dr. King wrote of his “disappointment” with white Christians in April 1963, it wasn’t a fresh wound, by a long shot. No, by this juncture Dr. King had long understood that he would not find an enlightened, unified approach to Christian brotherhood from their lot. Theirs was a god of racialized segregation and oppression, and it could never be otherwise without greater resistance from the oppressed.
As Dr. King wrote in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”,
I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
I’ve highlighted elements of this text that always haunt me, when people are quick to quote another famous quote by Dr. King: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Do folks know, when they toss out this line to reassure one another that everything will turn out okay, that they sound a lot like that “brother” in Texas? It might be better said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards cherry picking ideas about when justice will arise—if it does at all.”
Dr. King, of course, wasn’t the first to invoke the idea of our moral universe bending towards justice. An earlier formation comes from the abolitionist Reverend Theodore Parker, who in a sermon titled “Of Justice and the Conscience” (1852) pronounced,
Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
But when Dr. King uttered a distilled version of these words in 1967, in his famous “Where Do We Go From Here” speech for the SCLC in Atlanta, he did so in a much more confident context, declaring:
Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows.
Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right: “Be not deceived. God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This is our hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow, with a cosmic past tense, “We have overcome! We have overcome! Deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.”
The Dr. King of 1967, who could give such an uplifting sermon about the moral trajectory of the universe, wasn’t refuting his words from 1963, in a letter writtento fellow Christians criticizing him for struggle instead of sitting with him in prison. Rather, the later Dr. King was embodying those earlier words: leveraging hope and faith to try to be constructive in his time, and to fortify those around him.
The question, though, is whether we need the words of 1967 or the words of 1963 more today, as we reflect on the kinds of people we’ve been in the struggle.
Yes, of course, many want to sup on the nurturing words of Dr. King in 1967, as the US faces a terrible “midnight of the soul” in the wake of its election—and as the world around it braces for all the suffering that will ripple out from that terrible democratic call. Who wouldn’t want to be comforted by the promise that there is a great power on our side through every cruelty on this Earth, and that our societies will regain truth, justice, equality, and all that other good stuff again (just you wait and see!)?
…But have we earned it?
The Dr. King of 1963 was not the Dr. King of 1955: a Christian, that is, still capable of being shocked that his fellow Christian would not stand with him in struggle.
The Dr. King of 1963 already knew that the best he could expect from most of his white brothers and sisters in the faith was silence while he struggled—and at worst, public criticism for having the audacity to struggle in plain view at all.
Today, the same principle carries—in faith and in secular spheres alike. Many will not stand by you if they think the wind is against you; and yet, when the wind is with you, when it seems that history has lauded you for your struggle and sacrifice, then they will breathlessly quote your words in times of their own hardship, and marvel at how “inspiring” you were, to have stayed the course so resolutely through it all.
They will quote you, that is, even as they continue to be silent about—or to critique—fresh forms of struggle happening around them, too.
So when I say “knock it off”, I mean that collectively, for everyone who would pluck quotes out of time and context for a little reassurance in the present.
History is important, and it deserves to be considered in full. Instead of quoting Dr. King from 1967 without context, then, let’s invite some self-reflection around his most famous lines. What have we done to merit the comfort of such a sermon—and has it been enough? Or is it maybe time to sit with the Dr. King of 1963 instead, and allow that we’ve maybe been more like the Texan or the white clergymen in our own lives?
Near the end of “Letter Written from a Birmingham Jail”, Dr. King writes,
If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.
As an atheist, begging forgiveness to a god-concept is off the table for me, but I too worry a great deal about whether I’ve said anything that “understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood” (or its gender-neutral equivalent).
I think I might have. I think that on many occasions I could have done and said more than I did; and that, more than often than not, I’ve tarried in proactive response, while trying to wait out others’ discomfort with change and moral growth at all.
So rather than letting myself being soothed by the idea that everything will work itself out in due course—because it won’t: good gravy, will it not—I’m going to sit with the discomfort that this uncertainty about past action creates, and strive to do better.
After all, as someone said once from prison,
Time itself is neutral; it can be used either constructively or destructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will.
And what a world we might have, if this were the quote by Dr. King we heard more often in times of struggle: not to offer comfort through the hope of a greater power (time, or deity), but to recognize the power that we alone can wield—and must—if we’re to live to see that damned arc of the moral universe bend even a little for us all.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML