The White church still owes “Letter from Birmingham Jail” an answer
King’s letter is so soaked in US history that 60 years later we almost forget it was addressed not to the nation but to specific Christian pastors.
On Good Friday 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. and 50 others were charged with violating a court order against mass demonstrations. He was arrested and taken to the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was placed in solitary confinement. The freedom movement was at an early stage in Birmingham, and with King in jail, it suddenly faced a crisis of fundraising and leadership. On the same day, eight prominent White clergymen published a letter in the Birmingham News characterizing King’s movement as “unwise and untimely.” King scribbled his response in the margins of the newspaper and on sheets of stationery smuggled in by a sympathetic jailer.
King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” published 60 years ago this month, is so soaked in American history that we almost forget it was addressed not to the nation but to the White church. Its arguments for civil disobedience are hand-stitched into a letter addressed to those who claim to be Christian. I am both a fellow member of the church catholic and answerable to a category King consistently addresses as the “white church.” This makes me a double recipient of his scribbled letter, to which I and every Christian owe a reply.
The letter first appeared in a Quaker publication and then gained national circulation via The Century, where King was a contributing editor (see the June 12, 1963, issue). It quickly slipped the bounds of religious periodicals and entered the mainstream of the nation’s self-awareness. Nowadays, the letter is read aloud annually on the floor of the US Senate as a model of conscience and patriotism. It continues to be dissected in English composition classes as a model of clarity. My three grandchildren have studied it in Advanced Placement US government classes in high school, where it takes its place in the small canon of civic classics. The College Board’s guidelines for teaching the letter barely touch on its basis in religion.
