Reflecting on the Letter from a Birmingham Jail

I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes.

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote those words almost 60 years ago (April 16, 1963) as he languished in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama. King was arrested on Good Friday, April 12, 1963 for disobeying an induction made 2 days before against “parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing, and picketing,” a ruling clearly aimed to stop the protests begun on April 3 by King and members of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

King wrote the letter in response to an April 12 statement, “A Call for Unity,” by white mainline Christian leaders and a Jewish Rabbi, including the Episcopal, Catholic, and Methodist bishops of Alabama, the Moderator of the Presbyterian Synod of Alabama (PCUS), the rabbi of a large congregation in Birmingham, and the pastor of a Baptist church in Birmingham. King’s opponents were not rightwing fundamentalists; rather, they were part of the mainline religious establishment of King’s day. The establishment accused King, an “outsider,” of disrupting “law and order.”

…we are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.

Instead of protests, demonstrations, and marches, the white leaders of Birmingham appealed to hope in progress and “law and order.” These outsiders, they claimed, have disrupted the natural course of dialogue and progress, a course that is embedded in the very fabric of the democratic institutions of law enforcement (the police and the courts) and the legislature.

When rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets. We appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.

The problem in Birmingham, as these 8 clergymen saw it, was not one of racism and white supremacy, but rather a hiccup in the application of the law. The ideas that the law, that the way enforcement is structured and embedded in our society, that the citizenry as a body might themselves be racist — none of these were entertained in the slightest.

In response, King’s tack is radical—he proposed that some laws are unjust and demand disobedience.

To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.

And he suggests that the white leaders—”white moderates” as he calls them—could in fact be an enemy to the cause of racial reconciliation insofar as they prop up unjust laws in the name of patience, law, and order.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I think about King’s condemnation of the white moderate a lot these days, these days in which people of color are not only made inferior by our legal system, but terrorized by a system that considers whiteness to be superior to non-whiteness. The “white moderate” perpetuates and exacerbates these systems, not by raising a hand against black and brown sisters and brothers, but by indulging in the idolatry of security, their own security and comfort, at the expense of others, people who are deemed inferior implicitly by the white moderate’s failure to respond in compassion and truth.

White Christians in 2020 must examine their own idolatries, those things—commitments, biases, fears and anxieties—that block their participation in the calling of the Church to “do unto the least of these,” to “do justly, love mercy, and walking humbly with your God,” and, above all, to be Christ to the world, making God’s presence known in thought, word, and deed. They must do this not only to maintain their integrity as Christians, but because the lives of their sisters and brothers of color depend on it.

To do this will require repentance of things done and left undone, turning away from the ways of white moderation that have enabled our institutions to be places that harbor and perpetuate racism, racism which leads to the abuse and deaths of black and brown sisters and brothers, most recently those of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd.

We will have to become analytical and critical, not in our gaze of the other, but of ourselves as we seek to root out the deep prejudices that enable our complacency and inaction. We will have to be reflective and, above all, attentive as we listen to what our brethren of color say to us about their experiences and what they hear God’s Spirit calling the Church to do.

Near the end of his “Letter,” Martin Luther King, Jr. recounts driving through the South and looking at the many churches, “Over and over I have found myself asking: ‘What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?’” Perhaps now is the time to ask this of ourselves; as we board up our churches that we haven’t been in for weeks, as we worry about the loss or destruction of our churches’ property in the midst of these protests, let us ask ourselves, “Who are we who worship in these places? Who is the God we worship, and what does that God ask of us?”

Fr. Dan
The Feast of St. Boniface, 2020