Alliance Note: I spent some time this morning reading Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s storied “Letter from Birmingham Jail” that he wrote “in April 1963 in response to being imprisoned for his efforts to desegregate Birmingham, an important, industrial Alabama city known for its repressive and regressive policies during the 1960s. King decides to write because the Birmingham campaign, King’s policies, and his very presence have been attacked in print by eight white clergymen. King never names his critics, but his letter offers a detailed renunciation of their charges that his efforts are ill-timed, misguided, and inopportune. Bringing together ideas from philosophy, history, religion, and his own experience, King defends the program of nonviolent direct action and argues powerfully for the need to end racial injustice in the United States.” These words come from a summary that can be found here.
This morning, you can hear Reverend Dr. King read his own very inspiring words and view photos of his life at https://youtu.be/ATPSht6318o.
Below are some excerpts I’ve taken the liberty to draw from the full letter.
Harvey Rosenthal, CEO Alliance for Rights and Recovery
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
16 April 1963
My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.
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. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds…
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied….”
We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.”
But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; …when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.
…There are two types of laws: just and unjust. 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.”
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.