Table Of ContentContents
Timeline
Introduction: The Cry for Justice
Part One: The Prelude
Chapter One: Prisoner
This Is Blasphemy
Not Enough Negroes Are Ready to Die in Birmingham
Traitors to Their Race
Meet Me in Galilee
Part Two: The “Letter”
Chapter Two: Diplomat
My Dear Fellow Clergymen
The Word “Wait” Rings in the Ear of Every Negro
Everything the Nazis Did Was Legal
Chapter Three: Prophet
I Am an Extremist
What Kind of People Worship Here?
Abused and Scorned Though We May Be
Part Three: The Aftermath
Chapter Four: Street Fighter
Now Is the Time
A Child Shall Lead Them
Free at Last?
What Killed These Four Girls?
Epilogue: Words Spoken to Mankind
Acknowledgments
Footnotes
Notes
Appendix: The text of the “Letter from
Birmingham Jail”
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
For Catherine
Timeline
May 17, 1954 Supreme Court hands down Brown v. Board of Education.
June 5, 1956 Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) is founded in
Birmingham.
December 5, Blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, begin bus boycott.
1956
February 14, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) is founded.
1957
May 14, 1961 Freedom Riders are attacked at Birmingham’s Trailways bus station.
December 15, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., makes first speech in Albany, Georgia.
1961
July 1962 King is arrested and jailed twice in Albany.
November 6, George Wallace is elected governor of Alabama.
1962
January 10–11, King and colleagues decide to launch Birmingham campaign.
1963
January 14, 1963 Wallace is inaugurated.
January 14–17, National Conference on Race and Religion is held in Chicago.
1963
January 16, 1963 Alabama clergy issue “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense.”
March 5, 1963 Birmingham mayoral election results in runoff.
April 2, 1963 Albert Boutwell wins runoff election.
April 3, 1963 Birmingham protests begin.
April 12, 1963 King is arrested and jailed on Good Friday.
April 12, 1963 White clergy issue statement criticizing Birmingham demonstrations.
April 16, 1963 Date placed on the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
April 20, 1963 King is released from jail.
May 2, 1963 D-day: The Children’s Crusade begins.
May 3, 1963 Birmingham deploys fire hoses and police dogs against demonstrators.
May 10, 1963 Settlement is announced.
June 11, 1963 Two black students integrate the University of Alabama.
June 11, 1963 President John F. Kennedy delivers speech on race to the nation.
June 12, 1963 The “Letter from Birmingham Jail” appears in the Christian Century.
August 1963 The “Letter from Birmingham Jail” appears in the Atlantic.
August 28, 1963 King delivers “I Have a Dream” at the March on Washington.
September 15, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham is bombed.
1963
The image that traveled around the world: At a critical moment for Birmingham and the civil rights
movement, the authorities display their brutality. When President John F. Kennedy saw this picture of
a police dog mauling a bystander during the protests against segregation, he said that it made him
sick. (© Bill Hudson/AP/Corbis)
Introduction
The Cry for Justice
On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested,
booked, and jailed in Birmingham, Alabama. He had violated a court’s
injunction against marches during the battle to desegregate that city, a notorious
bastion of racist terror. King was convinced that if the movement could triumph
there, the walls of Southern segregation would crumble. While behind bars, he
wrote the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” At the very beginning, King declared,
“Just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus
Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry
the gospel of freedom beyond my own hometown.”1
Smarting from a recent setback in Albany, Georgia, and hungry for a civil
rights victory, King had carried that gospel to Birmingham in early 1963. He had
envisioned a massive campaign of nonviolent protest that would wield the
leverage of an Easter season boycott to integrate Birmingham’s downtown
stores. But with the insurgency faltering in the first weeks of April, King needed
a dramatic stroke. He decided to court arrest. The authorities obliged and put
him behind bars. While in jail, he read a statement in the local newspaper from
eight local white clergymen, all self-described racial “moderates.” They branded
King and his colleagues outsiders and extremists, rejected the demonstrations as
untimely, and chided the protesters for precipitating violence. The “Letter”
began as King’s retort to the clergymen.
For King’s closest colleagues, the “Letter” provided nothing less than the
moral and philosophical foundations of their movement. Over the next fifty
years, the stature of the “Letter” spread beyond the events that spawned it. It has
been hailed as one of our nation’s literary treasures, compared with the
Gettysburg Address and Émile Zola’s “J’Accuse,” and studied in countless
college and high school classrooms. The “Letter” earned King a place alongside
Gandhi and Thoreau as a champion of civil disobedience. The influence of its
vision of nonviolent direct action rippled across the globe to insurgents in
Soweto, Prague, and Beijing. King’s words—the bristling at those who tell the
oppressed to “wait for a more convenient season,” the steely conviction of the
irrepressible force of freedom in the world—have resonated among freedom
fighters long after the “Letter” was written.
The “Letter’s” broad appeal pays homage to the universalist stance in King’s
lofty opening: “I am in Birmingham because injustice exists here.” But King was
also there because “my people,” as he often referred to fellow blacks, were
suffering. King’s Christian faith in his Savior’s love for all God’s children
suffuses the “Letter,” but its driving force is black pain and anger. Those twin
imperatives match the larger duality of King’s life: action and argument,
exhorting blacks and persuading whites. There was always a two-way flow
between those two realms: The defiant purpose of the black uprising spilled into
the “Letter”; the “Letter’s” arguments about iniquity and its remedy flowed back
into mass meetings, freedom songs, and marches.
The Birmingham struggle gave rise to events that forever changed our nation.
The images from those months in the spring and summer of 1963 are now an
indelible part of our national history: the city’s black youth defying the fire hoses
and dogs of policemen dispatched to maintain white supremacy; the movement’s
leaders galvanizing the protest with rousing sermons and freedom songs like
“Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around”; President John Kennedy
addressing the nation in June, finally defining civil rights as an urgent moral
issue and national priority; and blacks and whites gathering at the Lincoln
Memorial in August for the March on Washington to hear King deliver “I Have a
Dream.”
The battle for civil rights was not finally won in the months King called the
long “summer of our discontent.” The Civil Rights Act, which banned
discrimination in public accommodations, was not passed until the following
year. Black defiance continued to spread across America. Battles with names
like St. Augustine and Selma—modern equivalents of Antietam, Gettysburg, and
Bull Run—lay ahead. On September 15, 1963, in a racist revenge killing, the
bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham took the lives of four
little black girls. The white backlash was just gathering force in the North. Still,
after Birmingham, the foundations of the nation’s old racial order cracked in
some elemental way and set the groundwork for the new one we live in today.
The “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the vision of nonviolence it argued for, and
the disinherited children of God it sanctified played a critical part in dismantling
Jim Crow.
