Letter From Birmingham Jail

Martin Luther King, Jr. was harassed and jailed more than a dozen times as a civil rights leader. He wrote the Letter From Birmingham Jail during an eight-day confinement. King's letter was written in response to a public statement by Birmingham clergymen. At the time he was protesting the segregated "busing" issues in the city's transportation system.

He was asked to go to Birmingham by his organization, the Alabama Christian Movement for Civil Rights. He rejected the idea that he was an "outside agitator" with the rebuttal that anyone living in the U.S. can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

"There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community," wrote King. "Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the U.S. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known."

MLK used non-violent protesting as a means to negotiation. He compared it the Socrates philosophy, believing that it was necessary to create mental tension to release individuals from the imprisonment of half-truths that obstructed creative analysis and unbiased evaluation. He was convinced the powers-that-be will not change imbedded beliefs unless pressured, and that such groups as the city politicians tend to be more immoral than the individual.

"The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation," he said.

He believed non-violent protesting did not create tension but brought to light hidden tension lying in the dark, comparing it to a boil that can only be healed when cut into and exposed to the light. He makde the argument that evil prospers when good men do nothing and that if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

King was pained when he spoke of his children. "When you have to tell your six-year old daughter why she can't go to a public amusement park that has just been advertised on TV and see tears well up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky ..."

He defends breaking of unjust laws by agreeing with St. Augustine, that an unjust law is no law at all. In King's own words, "A just law is a man made 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." Truth he gleaned from the writing of St. Thomas Aquinas. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.

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