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 badly timed and ill-advised.
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 answers the clergymen directly. They are anxious, he notes, about his readiness to break laws — so he draws the distinction they have missed. A statute can be disobeyed in good conscience when it is morally wrong. A law is just, he argues, when it lines up with the moral law, the law of God; it is unjust when it clashes with that higher 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, King charges, would rather have a hollow calm with no friction than a true peace built on justice actually done.
He is not writing about the Klan. He is writing about the church.
“An injustice left to stand in one place quietly endangers justice in every place, for we are bound to one another, threads woven into a single cloth of shared destiny.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963 — paraphrased
“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 badly timed.
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.
No one stands apart from anyone else, King insisted; we are bound together so tightly that an injury to one quietly becomes an injury to all. What happens to the person across town happens to you, whether you acknowledge it or not.
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?