Letter from Birmingham Jail

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The Letter from Birmingham Jail or Letter from Birmingham City Jail, also known as The Negro Is Your Brother, is an open letter written on April 16, 1963, by Martin Luther King, Jr., an American civil rights leader.

Contents

[edit] Background

King wrote the letter from the city jail in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was confined after being arrested for his part in the Birmingham campaign, a planned non-violent protest conducted by the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference against racial segregation by Birmingham's city government and downtown retailers. He gave bits and pieces of the letter to his lawyers to take back to movement headquarters, where the Reverend Wyatt Walker began compiling and editing the literary jigsaw puzzle.

[edit] Summary and themes

King's letter is a response to a statement made by eight white Alabama clergymen on April 12, 1963, titled "A Call for Unity". The clergymen agreed that social injustices existed but argued that the battle against racial segregation should be fought solely in the courts, not in the streets. They criticized Martin Luther King, calling him an “outsider” who causes trouble in the streets of Birmingham. To this, King referred to his belief that all communities and states were interrelated. He wrote, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider…”[1] King expressed his remorse that the demonstrations were taking place in Birmingham but felt that the white power structure left the black community with no other choice.

The clergymen also disapproved of the immense tension created by the demonstration. To this, King affirmed that he and his fellow demonstrators were using nonviolent direct action in order to cause tension that would force the wider community to face the issue head on. They hoped to create tension: a nonviolent tension that is needed for growth. King responded that without nonviolent forceful direct actions, true civil rights could never be achieved.

The clergymen also disapprove of the timing of the demonstration. However, King believed that, "This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.'"[1] King declared that they had waited for these God given rights long enough and that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”[1]

Against the clergymen’s assertion that the demonstration was against the law, he argued that not only was civil disobedience justified in the face of unjust laws, but that "one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

The letter includes the famous statement "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," as well as the words attributed to William Ewart Gladstone quoted by King: "[J]ustice too long delayed is justice denied."

[edit] Publication

Extensive excerpts from the letter were published, without King's consent, on May 19, 1963 in the New York Post Sunday Magazine. [2] The letter was first published as "Letter from Birmingham Jail" in the June, 1963 issue of Liberation[3] the June 12, 1963, edition of The Christian Century,[4] and in the June 24, 1963, issue of The New Leader. It was reprinted shortly thereafter in The Atlantic Monthly. King included the full text in his 1964 book Why We Can't Wait.

A 1999 study found that the essay was highly anthologized in that it was reprinted 50 times in 325 editions of 58 readers published between 1946 and 1996 that were intended for use in college-level composition courses.[5]

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c King, Martin Luther. "Letter from a Birmingham Jail". http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html. Retrieved 13 May 2011. 
  2. ^ Bass, S. Jonathan (2001). Blessed are the peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., eight white religious leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail". Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 0807126551.  p. 140
  3. ^ Liberation: An Independent Monthly. June, 1963 (page 10-16, 23)
  4. ^ Reprinted in Reporting Civil Rights, Part One - (page 777- 794) - American Journalism 1941 - 1963. The Library of America
  5. ^ Bloom, L. Z. (1999). "The Essay Canon". College English 61 (4): 401–430. doi:10.2307/378920. http://sites.duke.edu/english117as_01_f2011/files/2011/11/Bloom-1999-Essay-Canon.pdf. Retrieved 18 Jan 2012. 

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links

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Head and shoulders of a black man in a dark suit leaning on a lecturn, with his hands grasping the lecturn's top. Light comes from above and leaves the lower half of his round face in deep shadow. His hair is closely cropped and he has a pencil-thin mustache. He looks up over the reader's right shoulder, his full lips barely open, as if thinking what his next words will be.
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