Letter from Birmingham jail
King writes to fellow clergymen
King is in solitary confinement in Birmingham City Jail when eight white Alabama clergymen publish an open letter in the newspaper calling his demonstrations unwise and untimely.
He writes his response in the margins of the newspaper on which their letter was printed, continues on scraps of paper provided by a Black attorney, finishes on a pad his attorneys eventually smuggle in.
The Letter from Birmingham Jail is the most important piece of theological writing produced by the American civil rights movement — possibly the most important piece of American theological writing in the twentieth century.
King addresses the clergymen directly: You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. I can urge you to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong. A just law is a code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.
He draws on Augustine and Aquinas and Buber and Tillich and Paul and Jesus. He is not writing a political memo. He is writing a theological argument about what the church is for and what it has failed to be.
His most devastating passage is about the white moderate who prefers order to justice, who is more devoted to a negative peace which is the absence of tension than a positive peace which is the presence of justice.
He is not writing about the Klan. He is writing about the church.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963 AD
“But let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”
King wrote his most important theological work in a jail cell, on newspaper margins, in response to Christian ministers who told him his protest was untimely.
His most devastating target is not the segregationists. It is the moderate church — the church that agrees in principle with justice but prefers tranquility to the cost of achieving it. The church that will eventually arrive at the right position, but slowly, carefully, safely, without risking anything.
We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. What happens to the person across town happens to you, whether you acknowledge it or not. The garment of destiny is woven together.
Where is your church a moderate — agreeing in principle but unwilling to pay the cost of the agreement in practice? And what would it mean to move from principle to action before the moment of urgency has passed?