This text by Martin Luther King Jr. is worth reading purely for its rhetoric. It is worth reading because it is an incredibly important text in American history. It is.
If you had to come up with a list of the ten most important texts in American history, including the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, this text has got to be on that list. So, apart from the theologically important ideas in it, it is just a massive, moving, profound piece of writing, so well worth looking at and knowing and having had contact with. There's a question here, and an assumption here, about the benefit, the value, the goodness of pursuing justice and having justice as a reality in the world.
And we want to have a general definition of what justice is before going forward, so we can compare and contrast different ideas about it, or different presumptions about it. We might say, in a very broad way, that justice is a state of affairs where everyone gets what they are owed. That justice is a reality, or a set of interrelationships, or a system, or an institution, or I'm saying here a state of affairs, where you have multiple... multiple people in need of or deserving of multiple different kinds of things. Presumption is the things that individuals are deserving of or are owed are not unlimited.
Justice is a way of regulating and moderating how things go to different people. But that if people, if each person within... that system or that community is getting what they are owed, then you can say justice exists.
But immediately upon offering that general definition, which I imagine most of us would agree is a good thing, it's a good thing to have people receiving what they are owed or what they are due. We then get into the issue of, well, exactly how do you moderate it? What kinds of mechanisms do you use?
What kinds of priorities do you make? So we can talk, for instance, about the notion of justice as distributive. meaning a kind of way of very carefully choosing, deciding which amounts of what go to whom and what actually being owed means.
Meaning if we were sitting in class together and let's say there were 20 of us and there were 20 oranges available, is a notion of justice there? Each one of us deserves an orange, so we each get an orange. Well, what if one or two of us don't like oranges and we'd rather... give them up for somebody else to have an orange to exchange an orange for an apple. Well, is that a different form of distributive justice?
Do people receive things because they just are owed them because everybody is owed exactly the same thing? Or do people receive things and are owed things because some people need more than others? So these are all kind of complications when it comes to how you actually make justice real.
One might talk about retributive justice. Retributive justice comes about when something has gone wrong. Someone has violated perhaps someone else's well-deserving owed-ness.
Somebody has stolen something from someone else. And retributive justice is when punishment usually is put upon someone who has violated a rule or violated the value of justice itself. Retributive justice is about punishment.
If you do something wrong and you harm someone else, it is owed to you to be punished for it. it. Another take on that is restorative justice, meaning in the same situation, someone has done harm to someone else, someone has stolen something and has upset the balance of benefits and how they've gotten to people that are owed them or deserve them.
Restorative justice is a bit of a wider view of, okay, punishment may be necessary, but the purpose of punishment isn't just to be vengeful and hurtful to the person who violated the rule. Restorative justice is about healing and mending the... the wounded social fabric that comes about because of that issue of having violated someone else's right or someone else's value. We can perhaps even speak very broadly of social justice, which might broadly be a concern that we continue to have attitudes that allow communities and society in general to form individual practices and create institutions that are aware of the need for justice as an overriding concern. And there are other kinds of definitions of justice itself.
So even if justice is... to be agreed upon as a state of affairs where everyone gets what they're owed. Well, how we actually do that is something that is up for often for vigorous debate. The historical background to the letter from Birmingham Jail includes, in the United States, in the 20th century, at least, the struggle for civil rights.
The two big court cases in the 1950s, the Brown v. Board of Education, which the Supreme Court decided. schools would need to be desegregated throughout the entirety of the United States. And the Montgomery bus boycott, which took place in 1955, Rosa Parks is the great heroine of that event. In the 1950s, we see this movement gathering force and interest in particular to highlight the unfairness of practices like segregation of whites and blacks in institutions in the South.
or the lack of equal ability, for example, in the Montgomery bus boycott, for both black citizens and white citizens to benefit from things like public transportation, that this is a whole movement very much focused and interested in the experience of African Americans in the South, but not just exclusively to experience in the South, but post-Civil War era, from the prior century, there was still recognized a lot of issues. in terms of racial justice in the South. So the South becomes a real focus of this kind of movement.
In 1963, in particular, was a very busy year in the struggle for civil rights. The leaders of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. among them, made a decision in 1963 to focus attention for a while on the city of Birmingham, Alabama, because that city in particular was recognized as... being a place of egregious injustice and egregious racial problems. It was both because of political leadership in the city and the economic history of the city and just the lived experience of various communities in the city.
Birmingham was a place of real, real problems. So it was decided strategically that if the civil rights movement and leadership wanted to highlight and begin to get people... not just in the South, but all through the country, even throughout the world, to understand the importance and the terrible impact of these practices and structures, that to do it in a place like Birmingham would be efficient because there was so much bad going on there.
So the Birmingham Campaign, as it is referred to, is a concerted effort to have things like marches and sit-ins and other kinds of practices like that, disruptive practices and... protest practices began on April 6, 1963. The letter from Birmingham jail is written on April 16, 1963 because on April 12, Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested with some others and he goes to jail for a number of days and while in jail for, I believe the charge was marching without a permit, I think that there was a street demonstration that officially the police had not given permission for. They weren't going to get permission for it because they didn't want it to happen. And that was a decided, there was a strategic decision made to be open to being arrested precisely because of this reason. That happened on April 12th, and the letter comes out on April 16th.
On August 28th in 1963, King and others lead the March on Washington, which brings to the nation's capital this continuing work of bringing these issues into people's consciousness. On September 15, 1963, in Birmingham, an African-American church is bombed by some white supremacists, and a number of children are killed in that bombing. It's a terrible, terrible event, and yet another indication and fact of how bad the situation is in Birmingham.
And then on November 22, 1963, the president, John F. Kennedy, Jr. is assassinated in Dallas, Texas. So, 63 is a really difficult year. But after that difficult year, there are some good things happening.
So, the Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both ushered in by Kennedy's successor, President Johnson, are real triumphs and important positive constructive moments within this ongoing struggle for civil rights. So the author of the letter from Birmingham Jail is Martin Luther King Jr., born in 1929. Comes from a family of Baptist ministers and himself was a minister. Went to Morehouse College and Boston University.
In the mid-50s and early 60s, he had various preaching posts in the South and begins to assume leadership positions in the South. civil rights organizations, including, perhaps most importantly, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He is reluctantly pulled into this struggle, and we learn about those things in reading biographies about him, but he... He does sort of join it, and in 1963 is part of the Birmingham campaign. He's awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. In 1968, he's assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, as he's there to support a sanitation workers' strike in that city.
Who is the audience of this letter? Well, unfortunately, in the text that I've given you, it did not include the first direct address. But the letter is a public letter, it's an open letter, but it is addressed. specifically, my dear fellow clergymen. King is referring to a group of eight white clergy, five of them are pictured here, who had written an opinion piece in the local paper in Birmingham on April 12th.
calling for a show of unity and a slowing down of the public protest efforts for civil rights. So these are all white clergymen. There was a rabbi, there was a Catholic.
bishop, there were a number of Methodists, Episcopalians, so a wide range of clergy, white clergy, from the city of Birmingham, Alabama, from various traditions, who were in their own ways supportive of the Catholic Church. of the goals of the civil rights organizations, and were not white supremacists, were leaders of faith who clearly understood the importance of things like fairness and justice, but who were very anxious about the pace at which things were going, and basically publicly asked the leadership from the civil rights movement to slow down. So this letter is addressed from king as a clergyman to a group of his colleagues, other clergymen.
And we see in the letter that he uses the space of it to explain, to challenge, to prod, to push, to criticize respectfully these other clergy. But knowing specifically that the audience is not the public in general, and it is this group of other clergy who have said things that King finds in some ways hurtful and offensive, and he explains that a bit in the letter itself. The physical setting of the letter, of course, is King's prison cell. He was arrested on April 12th. That call for unity came out from those eight clergy on April 12th, and he responds while he is in jail.
The story is that there were scraps of paper, a newspaper, that were in the cell that he was able to scribble things out on, that those got snuck out from by visitors, that the letter went through a number of different drafts on the outside as King was sending out his drafts of the text. And that's the story. That's why it took at least four days before it could be published. It had to go through various drafts. Themes and resources that King uses in his rhetoric.
We want to ask, in the text itself, how is history important to King? Well, we know that he has a broad-ranging knowledge of... of other kinds of political realities and times in history and places in history where there have been struggles.
He mentions in particular just a few the Roman Empire, the experience of the early Christians, the difficulties of people living under the Roman Empire. Hitler more recently to him, and even he mentions a recent US legislation like Brown versus Board of Ed. So King is aware of a broad, vast swath of history and he is consciously placing himself within that sweep.
How specifically is the Bible important to King? You know, King is a minister. He preaches all the time. He's deeply aware of and deeply knowledgeable about Hebrew and Christian sacred texts. And just to mention a few, he talks about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Those were three Jewish young men who were imprisoned by... King, the king, the emperor at the time, and their imprisonments were tortured and came out victorious after that. He talks about St. Paul and St. Paul's journeys. He talks about the Hebrew prophets.
clearly putting himself and the struggle for civil rights and the other leaders in that struggle and everybody involved in the struggle in this line of history of religious people, religiously heroic people. But he also engages with great thinkers of the Western tradition. He mentions Socrates and St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas when he's talking about just laws or unjust laws, but he also mentions a whole bunch of contemporary thinkers.
Some Tillich might be of knowledge to people who study theology, and other thinkers as well. So he's also very well read, and he's, in a sense, also putting himself within the context of other thinkers. Some important issues that are explained by King here. He's, remember, he's explaining the rationale for doing certain things in a certain way to the clergy that he is addressing in the letter. Let's look at this passage where he describes discusses nonviolent direct action.
You may well ask, why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?
You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of a nonviolent resistor.
This may sound rather shocking, but I must confess that I am not afraid of the word tension in the world. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive non-violent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having non-violent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. So the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. We therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation.
Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue. So think about a strategy like of African Americans in the segregated South deliberately sitting in parts of a bus that said only whites. Imagine that is an action if it is done purposely and strategically that is a form of nonviolent direct action. It is a way of making things so tense, making things so uncomfortable, that it brings to light the problematic nature of those kinds of structures. It is meant to Deliberately bring about uncomfortable feelings so that bad things come to the light of day, and then, one hopes, can be dealt with.
But note, this is not revolution. in the sense of violence. This is deliberately confronting things, but doing in a way that is peacefully resistant. It must be a very difficult kind of balance to strike.
Another excerpt. Note that this is one entire sentence of the letter. And here he is trying to explain to the clergy he is addressing about the fact of impatience and the reasons for an unwillingness now on the part of civil rights leaders and the communities that they are with to continue to not do something.
He says, But when you have seen vicious moms lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim, When you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity, 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 cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental... sky and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness towards white people. When you have to concoct an answer to a five-year-old son asking an agonizing pathos, Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean? When you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you. When are you humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading, white and colored.
When your first name becomes, and I won't use that word, and your middle name becomes boy, however old you are, and your last name becomes John, and when 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 a tiptoe stance, never knowing what to expect next, and 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. One sentence, clauses connected by semicolons. The longest clause there about the little girl realizing that she can't go to the amusement park because she's black.
And in this rhetoric, of course, King is talking about waiting, the difficulty of waiting for things to change. And what he is doing is he is making his listeners, those clergy, he is making them wait to the end of the sentence. sentence, by making that sentence so long.
This is a demonstration of the need of learning to wait that King forces upon his readers. King also recognizes, with some respect, but then with maybe perhaps more frustration, the solidarity that these white clergy and white moderates in the South at the time want to convey to the civil rights leaders, but in their moderation are actually providing a worse kind of barrier than the worst kind of white supremacist would he says i must make two honest confessions to you my christian jewish brothers first i must confess that over the last few years i have been bravely 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 counselor or the Ku Klux Klan-er, 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 and the goal you seek but i can't agree with your methods of direct action who paternalistically feels that 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 good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright projection. And also want to raise the question, do we see a thing pointed to here similar to another place that we've looked at? King says, I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice, and that when they fail to do this, they become dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is merely a necessary phase of the transition from a non-modernist to a modernist. obnoxious negative peace. We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension.
We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with. Think a little bit about that.
How similar is this to René Girard's notion of mimetic desire and sacred violence, that set of notions that James Allison used in his reading and interpretation of the Book of Jonah? If you remember there, René Girard and James Allison are of the view that society naturally has these dynamics of making someone or something a scapegoat, of needing to create a victim who will absorb all the negativity and all the evil of a group, and to be rejected. Think about how this method of nonviolent direct action is actually a way of engaging with that kind of reality, because it's trying to unearth and uncover all of that, all the negativity.
all of the rejection that is already going on inside of a society or a community. But that nonviolent direct action, in King's view or in his practice of it, becomes a kind of positive or constructive or controlled strategic way of handling the evil that is present. So what kinds of points is King making in this? Well, He wants to say that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, that there cannot be real justice unless there is justice for everyone.
He says history is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily, which is the justification and the need, points to the need for having movements and strategies, organized strategies, to bring some sort of change about. There will not... People in power do not give up power easily. He says, an unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself.
And think of this dynamic for a moment. What do we call it when somebody establishes standards or rules for other people, but is not willing to uphold them themselves? We call that hypocrisy.
The hypocrite is the person who says to everyone else, you need to behave like this, this is the proper thing to do. what is unwilling to submit to it themselves. Hypocrisy is a bad thing. This is unjust laws, or hypocrisy codified.
And his notion here that one of the most painful things that comes up in that long passage, that one long sentence, where he's explaining to the clergy he's writing to about what happens when you wait, that what's being... Fought against is the sense of nobodiness. King says in another place in the letter that what is being sought is a sense of somebody-ness, that it's a terrible thing for an entire race or a group of people or community to feel that they are nobody.
All that is being sought is that they are somebody.