On Letter from Birmingham Jail

It was written in the margins of a newspaper, in a cell, in answer to clergymen who had called the protests untimely. In April 1963, jailed for leading demonstrations against segregation in Birmingham, Martin Luther King read a public statement by eight local white clergymen urging Black citizens to be patient and to pursue their goals in the courts rather than the streets. His reply, the Letter from Birmingham Jail, is the moral high point of the American civil-rights movement in prose, and one of the great documents of conscience in the language.

The clergymen's central charge was that the protests were ill-timed, that the cause was just but the moment wrong, that change should come gradually and through proper channels. King's answer dismantles the counsel of patience completely. Freedom, he writes, is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. The word wait has almost always meant never. He then does something the abstract appeal for patience cannot survive: he makes the cost of waiting concrete, the daily humiliations, the violence, the explaining to a child why she cannot go to the public amusement park, the accumulated weight of being told, always, to wait a little longer. Justice too long delayed is justice denied, and the patience the clergymen counseled was patience with injustice.

The letter's deepest passage answers the objection that King, who urged obedience to the law in the fight against segregation, was himself breaking laws. He draws the distinction that resolves it. A just law is one that squares with the moral law; an unjust law is one out of harmony with it, a law that the powerful impose on the powerless but do not bind themselves by. One has a moral responsibility to obey just laws, and an equal responsibility to disobey unjust ones, openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty, precisely in order to arouse the conscience of the community to the injustice. This is Thoreau's civil disobedience and Gandhi's satyagraha, both on these shelves, brought to bear on American segregation with overwhelming moral clarity.

King also turns, with controlled disappointment, on the white moderate who prefers a negative peace, the absence of tension, to a positive peace, the presence of justice, and who is therefore a greater obstacle to freedom than the outright bigot. It is a warning to every comfortable bystander who wishes the disruption would stop more than they wish the injustice would end.

The Letter belongs at the center of any American library of the republic, the culmination of the long argument, running from the Declaration through Douglass and Stanton, about holding the country to its founding promise. It is in copyright and widely available in print and in many anthologies. Read it whole; it is not long, and there is not a wasted sentence.