Lisa Loren: Catalysis

I wrote this academic essay of King’s “Letter to Birmingham Jail” this summer. I’m a great admirer of King, and although I don’t have time to write a post on his thoughts today, I don’t want to let today’s celebration of his life pass unmarked. May your message live on, Dr. King.

On April 12, 1963, with Martin Luther King in Birmingham jail and tension mounting in the city, eight white Alabama clergymen issued a statement condemning the “extreme measures” of the Birmingham demonstrations as “unwise and untimely.” Although King responded directly to this statement with his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the clergy’s statement didn’t actually address him at all. Aside from a brief disparaging remark about protests “directed and led in part by outsiders”, in fact, it never mentioned the leaders of the civil rights movement at all. (Carpenter et all) Instead, they addressed the statement towards “our Negro citizens.” King’s choice, then, to address his open letter to them directly, rather than to the black citizenry he depends on, strikes an odd chord at first. Wouldn’t his response be better directed to the same people the Alabama clergymen target? Why does he bother with those white preachers at all?

In their statement, the eight Alabama clergymen assert themselves as a sort of paternalistic moral authority, better able to see what forms of protest the black people of Birmingham ought use than those living under the oppressive weight of segregation. They portray King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council as mere rabble-rousers, without any understanding of the real moral significance of the situation. These men and people like them have such a large influence over the moral politics of the South that King cannot merely preach over their heads and hope that his voice will be heard. To win over the black populace of Alabama and their own white constituents, King must tackle the Alabama clergymen on their own moral and intellectual ground. To this end, his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” reads much differently than his speeches, packed with references to important political and religious figures. King uses these stories and quotes, from Socrates to Jesus to Martin Buber, to assert himself as a moral and intellectual authority equal to any group of white Southern preachers.

According to Wesley Mott, such disregard for the procedures of formal logic and laid-out, step-by-step proofs is typical of “old-time Negro preaching.” (413) In his speeches and sermons, in fact, King often sways listeners to his side with nothing but heartfelt exclamations. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech doesn’t quote the Bible or great moral thinkers even once, despite constant religious language. They are all “God’s children,” (2) he says, although he never makes as much as a sideways reference to stories of creation or Biblical tales of brotherhood. He asks for “righteousness” (2) without the Old Testament God and declares that “unearned suffering is redemptive” (3) without ever touching on the suffering of Christ. The overall impression, however, is not of fast-and-loose morals or lazy Biblical scholarship. King comes across as a man whose convictions are too unshakable to need petty chapter-and-verse citations.

Compare this with the numerous quotes, stories, and religious references King loads into his “Letter”. To speak accurately to such a varied group of individuals, personified in the Catholic Bishops, Methodist Bishops, Pastor, Rabbi, and Presbyterian Moderator that signed the statement of Alabama clergymen, King must speak to them on their own terms, through their own stories and philosophical documents. King doesn’t try to prove the necessity of action or morality of nonviolent civil disobedience in the terms that only a black spiritualist could understand – those that could be swayed by King’s personal tradition already follow him. He turns to Socrates, to Saint Augustine and Martin Buber and Paul Tillich and Jesus Christ. Through his examples, King tailors his “Letter” to the precise leanings and denominations of his audience. In response to accusations of extremism, he responds with a battery of historical extremists: For the rabbi, “Amos, an extremist for justice”. For the Christians, “Jesus, an extremist for love,” and “Paul, an extremist for the Christian gospel.” For the Protestants, Martin Luther. For secular Americans, Abraham Lincoln: and Thomas Jefferson. (Why We Can’t Wait, [WWCW], 77) King attaches to each a snippet of writing or a pithy quote that both proves his point (that they are extremists of a sort) and brings to mind the larger scope of their lives and work. What American could read Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” without remembering “and endowed by their creator unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”? What minister could hear Jesus tell his disciples to “Love your enemies” without remembering his commitment to stand up for his faith without violence? In 140 words, King tells a half-dozen stories about religious devotion, political conscience, and activism for justice.

In speaking to the leaders of the white church, King hopes to enact change among its constituents. To put it bluntly, he sees the white clergy as the moral mind of white politics, and where he leads the head, the body, the congregations of the white church, will follow. Although his language is always couched in moral terms, he does not disapprove merely of the white church, but of the white moderate as a whole. Despite their shared religious background, they have sided with skin color over justice, and King treats them as almost a kind of failure to the cause. Mimicking the blatantly paternalistic tone they use with him, he is vocal in his disappointment. ” I have been gravely disappointed,” he says. (WWCW, 72) “I had hoped…. I had hoped,” (73) “I had also hoped,” (74) “I was rather disappointed,” (75) “I had hoped…I was too optimistic…I expected too much.” (77) “I have been so greatly disappointed in the white church.” King continues with his hopes, always shattered, and his disappointment, moving gradually from the vagueness of the “white moderate” to a highly specific criticism of the “white churchmen [who] stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies.” (79) King mentions his disappointment numerous times, both as a rhetorical technique and to drive home the reality of his relationship with the white moderate church. Every time he brings up a hope or a smashed expectation, King asserts himself as someone standing to expect concrete things from the religious white, and to express disappointment in them when the fail to live up. In the area of civil rights, King takes on the form of a parent, rendering their unwillingness to support him both childish and disobedient. It falls to the white clergy, the “other parent”, to support him as a united front against immorality.

King’s “Letter,” then, is a study in layers: parables and quotes that would make immediate sense to the average moderate white, but have a deeper meaning clear to those who have studied politics, t\ethics, and morality. This kind of concise, multi-layered storytelling is both a demonstration of Kings intellectual muscle and a symptom of the conditions under which he composed his “Letter”. As he recounts in a footnote in Why We Can’t Wait, King wrote in “under somewhat constricting circumstances” on newspaper margins and scraps of paper. (64) Deprived the opportunity to weave together complicated narratives or draw strength through the kind straightforward repetition he used to such great advantage in his “I Have a Dream” speech. With the space he had available, King needed to do more with every dropped name and adjective than bring to mind a half-forgotten story. His letter, then, must make the greatest possible use of every anecdote and adjective. As opposed to his longer works, such as Why We Can’t Wait, where he explains political realities and detailed history, King must imply a mountain of history with every name. Even if no one reader could immediately grasp every source he used, King left the Catholics with the taste of overcoming Paul’s sin and the Jews with Abednego’s willingness to sacrifice himself for God.

To provide a framework for civil disobedience itself, King cannot spare the time to wander through the complete history of the civil disobedience movement. Rather than dwelling on Thoreau, who pioneered the term but on the whole gave up very little of himself to the betterment of society, King draws on the irreproachable scholar, the martyr to intellectual thought: Socrates. When asked, “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” he responds with the man who may be his original model for nonviolent protest. By framing his attempt to create “tension in society” with Socrates’ attempt to “to create a tension in the mind”, he gives his revolutionary tactics the clout of thousands of years of history. In a few words, “the bondage of myths and half-truths”, he draws parallels between the physical oppression of blacks and the oppressive effects that superiority has on whites. King borrows Socrates’ “gadflies”, the irritants that Socrates says the gadfly are a gift “which God has given the state”. (WWCW, 67)As Socrates says, they ensure that the people don’t “sleep on for the rest of your lives.” (Plato, 460) Without taking up his arrogance, King can absorb the idea that disruption itself, so long as it disrupts a dangerous status quo, is a kind of divine mission. The bite his gadflies deliver to complacent white society is both a small pain and an awakening, enlightenment.

Socrates himself serves as a reminder that nonviolent resistance has a secular history, as well as a religious one. In fact, King brings him up twice more as a model the pitfalls and accomplishments of true civil disobedience. Socrates mocked and irritated the people of Athens in the name of exposing reality, and eventually that same populace executed him. Rather than labeling him as one who merely created unrest, King declares that his “unswerving commitment to the truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock.” (WWCW, 74) In his death, Socrates modeled the same unwillingness to violently resist authority that King espouses. Just as King urged his comrades to submit meekly to arrest, Socrates refused to flee the judgment of Athens. King credits this kind of civil disobedience for the existence of “Academic freedom…today,” (WWCW, 72) a freedom that his more academic critics no doubt appreciated.

He also brings up whole bodies of modern philosophical work with a few well-placed words. Speaking of segregation, he uses Martin Buber’s “I-it” and “I-thou” relationships to conceptualize the way segregation “relegat[es] persons to the status of things.” (WWCW, 71) Buber’s “I-it” and “I-thou” describe more than a difference in relationships between people. With them, King describes twin states of dialogue, the “I-thou” that listens and discusses, and the “I-it” that refuses to negotiate, he gives credit to his earlier assertion that the South is “bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.” (WWCW, 6 Beyond this basic use of Buber’s text, however, King likely found the well-respected Jewish philosopher’s methods of logic similar to his own. Critics attacked Buber as “more affected than honest” (Bloch, 42. Cited by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.), more given to soul-driven, emotional reasoning than to an outpouring of cold textual support. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” suffers from these supposed faults less than his speeches, but he still drew on Buber as model of affective logic outside of the ghettoized realm of old Negro preachers.

Buber, although tied closely in with the spiritualist traditions of Judaism, is not a religious authority in his own right, any more than Paul Tillich or Socrates deliver some kind of absolute moral conviction on what should and should not be done. To properly argue morality with a group of clergy, who are in their own right expected to know right from wrong, moral from immoral acts, King must turn to a source higher than both he and his opponents: the Bible. More specifically, he must defend the ultimate morality of his methods as well as his cause. The Alabama clergymen, after all, didn’t deny that segregationist laws needed to be overturned, eventually, they objected to King’s methods. They don’t believe that “extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.” (Carpenter) To answer this challenge to civil disobedience, King frames it in a religious light with the stories of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who refused “to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake” and “the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions…rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire.” (WWCW, 72) King cites these, on the surface, as instances of moral resistance to civil law, putting them directly in parallel with his own civil disobedience, while letting the stories themselves speak to higher purposes. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were put to fire for their refusal to worship a graven idol, and the early Christians violated the Roman laws requiring them to worship Roman gods. In both cases, they exemplify King’s principle of opposing the law of the land in favor of a higher law. Furthermore, they personify the possible results of any civil disobedience – God saved Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego for their willingness to sacrifice themselves, but the early Christians willingly died for their faith.

This kind of comparison should function on its own to refute claims that the Birmingham protesters invited and deserved violence, but King dispels that particular claim more directly. “Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion?” (WWCW, 74) While one could perhaps criticize the old Jewish heroes for inviting their fate by choosing to live under an evil king, or the early Christians for refusing to run, Jesus’ crucifixion was essential to the birth of Christianity. No religious scholar, regardless of background, would dare blame him for “precipitating violence”, especially given his calls for love and nonviolent action. Jesus embodies the dialectic that King’s protesters try to live by – enacting change by nonviolent means, even if they are met by violence.

Perhaps King’s strongest use of religious figures comes to justify his presence in Birmingham. When challenged about his right to be in Birmingham, King quickly goes to the stories of eighth-century prophets and “the Apostle Paul” leaving their villages to spread their “thus saith the Lord” and “the gospel of Jesus Christ” to the greater world. (WWCW, 65) King tells his opponents that he carries “the gospel of freedom”, raising his cause to the level of a divine command. His presence in Birmingham is not a choice, it is the fulfillment of a duty as sacred as the crusade. King, however, does not come to Birmingham as a white European missionary might come to the poor of Africa. He describes Paul and the prophets as coming from villages, in an earlier draft, “little villages” (Best American Essays, 246) as a way to downplay his experience as a civil rights leader. King does not wish to work as a man with status and political clout. In Why We Can’t Wait, where space is less scarce, King alludes to this more directly. “No Negro anywhere, regardless of his social standing, his financial status, his prestige and position, is an outsider so long as dignity and decency are denied” to black people anywhere. (55) More specifically, even a PhD and national recognition do not make people like King outsiders when there is work to be done in the name of God and freedom.

Works Cited 

Carpenter et all. Statement by Alabama Clergymen [Untitled]. April 12, 1963.

King, Martin Luther. “I Have a Dream” [Speech]. August 28, 1963. Available online courtesy of the Avalon Project at Yale Law School.

King, Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. The Best American Essays of the Century. Ed. Atwan, Robert, and Joyce Carol Oates. Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 236-279.

King, Jr., Dr. Martin Luther. Why We Can’t Wait. New York, Signet Classics, 2000.

Mott, Wesley. “The Rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Phylon. Vol. 36, No. 4, (1975) 411-421.

Plato. The Republic and Other Works. Trans B. Jowett. New York, Doubleday & Company, 1960.

Zank, Michael, “Martin Buber”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)