Letter from a Birmingham Jail

16 Jan Letter from a Birmingham Jail

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Click here to read the typed version of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” – which is also pasted below.

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My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.”  Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas…but since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham.  I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here.  I am here because I have organizational ties here [to the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.]  But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.  Just as the prophets 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 home town.  

I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned with 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.  

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action.  We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham.  

You may well ask: “Why direct action?  Why sit ins, marches and so forth?  Isn’t negotiation a better path?”  You are quite right in calling for negotiation.  Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action.  Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.  My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking.  But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.”  I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.  I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation.  Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.  Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.  Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.  Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.  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 jet-like 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; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are [black], 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 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 you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers.  First, 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 that outright rejection.

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.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever.  The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself.  So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent” [with injustice.]  Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent [over discrimination] can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action.  And now this approach is being termed extremist.  But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label.  Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.”  Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”  Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.”  Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.”  And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.”  So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.  Will we be extremists for hate or for love?  Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?   Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need.  Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much.  I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action.

Let me take note of my other major disappointment.  I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership.  [Far too many white Christian leaders] have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.”  In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.  

There was a time when the church was very powerful—in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed.  In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.  Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians as “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.”  Things are different now.  So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound.  So often it is an arch-defender of the status quo.  Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent—and often even vocal—sanction of things as they are.

 But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before.  If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for [our times.]  

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic.  Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world?  I am thankful to God that some noble souls have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom.  They have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.  Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel.  They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.  

Over the past few years, I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.  I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.  But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.  As T.S. Eliot has said, “The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

Never before have I written so long a letter.  I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts, and pray long prayers?

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.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith.  I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother.  Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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