Thursday, Aug 21, 2008
The power of Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights call-to-arms comes from watching a great man grapple with the possibility that he's wrong.
Aug 19, 2003 | In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. called Birmingham, Ala., "by far the worst city for race relations in America." Also known as "Bombingham," the city had become infamous for at least 50 bombings of black homes and churches in the years since World War II, along with Sheriff Bull Connor's fire hoses and snarling police dogs during Freedom Summer in 1961. And all of that was before the awful slaughter at the 16th Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963, when white supremacists blew up the spiritual home of the local civil rights movement during crowded Sunday services, killing the "Four Little Girls" memorialized by Spike Lee's devastating film of the same name and wounding 23 people.
So it's hard to imagine that when King wrote his famed "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," he was facing national criticism for bringing the wrath of the civil rights movement down upon a hapless city that, despite its ugly past, was supposedly doing its best to change. But that's exactly what provoked King's great work. On the eve of the minister's April 1963 direct action campaign against Birmingham, its citizens had just held an election that repudiated the administration that backed Bull Connor (though Connor's allies were challenging it in the courts). A covert alliance between conservative blacks and white businessmen concerned about the city's brutal image was trying to find ways to dismantle local segregation gradually. And many Birmingham black people were skeptical of King's crusade. The civil rights leader went to jail that Good Friday, April 12, 1963 -- on the trumped-up charge of parading without a permit -- at least partly because almost nobody else would. Three-quarters of the city's black ministers, for instance, at first withheld support from King's campaign.
But the rebuke that prompted King's letter was a statement by eight white Birmingham religious leaders denouncing his moves against the city. The eight men praised the emergence of "a new constructive and realistic approach to racial problems" in Birmingham; they attacked King, though not by name, as an "outsider"; and they urged "our local Negro community" to protest its grievances in the courts, not in the streets. Thanks to King's letter, the eight went down in history as having been on the wrong side of the fight for justice, but in fact, all of them had at least weakly denounced segregation and the white-supremacist violence that bolstered it, and at least a couple had faced white Birmingham's wrath by welcoming blacks to their churches.
And the clergymen weren't alone in their condemnation of King: As Taylor Branch details in "Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-1963," Time magazine called his Birmingham campaign "a poorly timed protest" and the Washington Post insisted it was "prompted more by leadership rivalry than the real need of the situation." The New York Times praised the new administration of Mayor Albert Boutwell and editorialized that it didn't expect change in Birmingham "overnight" -- and cautioned that King "ought not to expect it either." President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, meanwhile, were fed up with the Atlanta minister's jail-going ways and resisted his wife Coretta's pleas to intervene.
Even coming to King's "Letter" without that context, an astute reader can sense something eating away at the soul of the great leader. It's painful to read. King's suffering is more than the fact that he's in jail -- "Jail helps you to rise above the miasma of everyday life," he told supporters once. And it's not just that he's in "the hole," confined in solitary even though his celebrity status had forced his jailers in other cities to treat him with kid gloves. No, the man is miserable because his critics have forced a lonely confrontation with the possibility that he's wrong: wrong about the pace of change in Birmingham, wrong about the need for direct action, wrong about leaving Coretta for Birmingham and jail only days after the birth of their second daughter, Bernice.
It's the intimacy and vulnerability of King's "Letter" that gives it power. He speaks to us as a leader, as a father, as a scholar, as a sinner. It's at turns prophetic (critics might say pompous):
"I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their 'thus saith the Lord' far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and 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 home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid."
And personal:
"Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark 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 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: 'Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?'; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored'; when your first name becomes 'nigger,' your middle name becomes 'boy' (however old you are) and your last name becomes 'John,' and your wife and mother are never given the respected title 'Mrs.'; 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. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience."
It's bitterly angry:
"I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last 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 the 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 can't agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a 'more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection ...
"Let me rush on to mention my other disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership ... I do not say that as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say it as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen .... I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause, and with deep moral concern, serve as the channel through which our just grievances would get to the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed. I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshippers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers say, 'follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother.'"
And it's occasionally apologetic:
"If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me."
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