At a mass meeting that night, King brought people to their feet when he cried, “Injunction or no injunction, we’re going to march. Here in Birmingham, we have reached the point of no return. Now they will know that an injunction can’t stop us.” For the first time, King would violate a state-court injunction and willingly go to jail for it. Maybe his example would put an end to that insidious legal obstruction.
But late Thursday night brought devastating news. King’s bondsman had run out of bail money, and Belafonte’s New York committee had no additional funds to send. In his motel room, King plunged into gloom. Scores of incarcerated volunteers were awaiting bail, and tomorrow fifty more would get arrested with him and Abernathy. Without bail money, his people would all have to stay in jail. There would not be enough recruits to continue the demonstrations and picket lines.
Early the next morning, King assembled twenty-four key lieutenants in Room 30 to discuss the crisis. After a while they fell silent, overcome by a feeling of hopelessness. Finally someone said, “Martin, this means you can’t go to jail. We need money. We need a lot of money. You are the only one who has the contacts to get it. If you go to jail, we are lost. The battle of Birmingham is lost.”
King was in agony. The man was right. Yet he had announced to Birmingham—to all the country—that he was going to get arrested today. How could he face his people if he broke his promise? What would his critics say—what would the country think—if he now refused to go to jail after urging hundred of Birmingham Negroes to make jail their badge of honor?
“I sat in the midst of the deepest quiet I have ever felt,” King said later. Then he rose and went into a bedroom at the back of the suite. And he stood there in the middle of the room—and the center of “all that my life had brought me to be.” There was no choice really. He had to make his witness, on the faith that God would not abandon him in this dismal hour. With that faith, he changed into his work clothes—blue jeans and a blue cotton shirt—and returned to the group in the next room. “I’m going to jail,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know where the money will come from. But I have to make a faith act.” Though there was muttering among his lieutenants, King had them join hands and sing “We Shall Overcome.”
Then it was off to Zion Hill Church, where hundreds of people were waiting in the sanctuary and on the steps and walks outside, come this Good Friday to witness the march and arrest of Martin Luther King. At the pulpit, King declared that things were so bad in Birmingham that only “the redemptive influence of suffering” could change them. And he was heading to jail now, “a good servant of my Lord and Master, who was crucified on Good Friday.” As he strode down the aisle, someone said, “There he goes. Just like Jesus.”
He led his fifty volunteers downtown, past sunlit azaleas and yellow forsythia in full blossom, with hundreds of clapping Negroes surging in their wake. Police barricades cordoned off their line of march, and cops were everywhere, on foot, on rooftops, and in patrol and mobile communications centers. At last King came face to face with a shouting Bull Connor and knelt with Abernathy in prayer. At that detectives and motorcycle police grabbed them by the seats of their pants and threw them and all the other marchers into paddy wagons, which bore them to Birmingham city jail with sirens wailing.
And so for the thirteenth time King was arrested and jailed. This time he found himself in solitary confinement, locked away in a narrow, murky dungeon without a mattress or a pillow and blanket. Nobody, not even his attorneys, could get in to see him. He lay on a bedspring in a pool of darkness, a single shaft of light shining through a high window, casting a jail-bar illumination on the walls above. Time seemed to stand still. He worried constantly about the movement, whose entire future hung in the balance, depending on capricious events over which he had no control. How would his lawyers raise bail money? Would people continue to march and man picket lines? He worried about Abernathy and the other prisoners, for whom he felt personally responsible. He missed Abernathy; the loneliness was getting to him. How many hours had he been in here? “Those were the longest, most frustrating hours I have lived,” he said. “I was in a nightmare of despair.”
But the next day conditions mysteriously improved. A Negro lawyer was able to visit him briefly, to make sure he was all right. Across Birmingham, across America, people anxiously awaited word about his safety. Another day passed, another night. Then on Easter Sunday afternoon, the jailers let two of his lawyers see him. By now he was suffering from nervous exhaustion, so tired that his voice was strained. Beyond the jail, King’s brother A. D., who pastored a church in Birmingham, was leading more than 1,500 Negroes on the largest protest march of the campaign. When his attorneys left, King felt isolated and depressed again. But on Monday another visitor materialized at his cell. It was Clarence Jones, a movement lawyer from New York. “Harry Belafonte has been able to raise fifty thousand dollars for bail bonds,” Jones said. “It is available immediately. And he says that whatever else you need, he will raise it.”
“I cannot express what I felt,” King said later, “but I knew at that moment that God’s presence had never left me, that He had been with me there in solitary.”
After that his jailers were suspiciously courteous. They brought him a pillow and a mattress and allowed him out to exercise and shower. They even let him phone Coretta, who was immensely relieved to hear that he was all right. But he sounded so tired, so weak. Did he know that she had talked with the Kennedys? Worried sick about him, she had phoned Washington and finally gotten through to Robert Kennedy, who promised to find out why her husband was in solitary confinement. Then just fifteen minutes ago, she said, President Kennedy himself had phoned her and said that “we” had talked with Birmingham about King and that he would be calling her shortly. “So that’s why everybody is suddenly being so polite,” King said. “This is good to know.” It meant that his imprisonment was causing anxiety in Washington, too. He told her, without mentioning names, to inform Wyatt Walker about her talk with Kennedy so that a statement could go to the press.
ON TUESDAY, APRIL 16, King’s attorneys returned to his cell with a four-day-old copy of the Birmingham News, which carried two statements about the campaign. One was signed by more than sixty local Negro leaders and called for blacks to support King and for whites to commence negotiations. The other statement, however, rehearsed the standard objections to the protests (they were unwise and untimely and run in part by “outsiders”), praised the Birmingham police for their restraint, and urged local Negroes to shun the disturbances and press their case in the courts rather than the streets. It was signed by eight Christian and Jewish clergymen of Alabama, all of them white.
As King read over their statement, he had an inspiration. He was going to compose a rebuttal to those clergymen in the form of an open letter, a letter such as Paul might have sent them. He sensed a historic opportunity here, a chance not only to address the moral voice of the white South, but to produce a defense of the movement with profound symbolic import. Would not all America be stirred by a calm and reasonable disquisition on nonviolence, written by a Christian minister held in jail in the most segregated city in the country? With a pen smuggled in by his lawyers, King sat in the shadows of his cell and began writing on the margins of the Birmingham News—and continued on scraps of toilet and writing paper supplied by a friendly Negro trusty—this lyrical and furtive epistle.
“MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:
While confined here in Birmingham jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities ‘unwise and untimely.’… Since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.”
Since the clergymen had been influenced by the argument about “outsiders coming in,” King explained that he was in Birmingham because injustice was here and because he must respond like Paul to the Macedonian call for help. “Moreove
r, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. 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 anywhere within its bounds.”
The clergymen deplored the demonstrations in Birmingham but not, King was sorry to say, the conditions that made them necessary: all the unsolved bombings and the whole “ugly record of brutality” that made Negro life here so grossly unjust. The Negro had tried to negotiate with the city fathers (as the clergymen advised), but the city had refused to do so in good faith. Then the leaders of Birmingham’s economic community agreed to remove those “humiliating racial signs” from their stores, only to break their promise. “As in so many past experiences,” King wrote, “our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community.”
The purpose of direct action, King said, was “to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.” It was not a violent and destructive tension Negroes were after, but a “constructive, nonviolent tension” that led to growth. “Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so we must see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”
Like many others, King wrote, the clergymen branded the Birmingham campaign as “untimely.” But it was a fact of history, he contended, that privileged groups seldom surrendered their privileges on their own, and that groups (as Niebuhr stressed) “tend to be more immoral than individuals.” The Negroes’ own painful experience taught them that “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. King reminded the clergymen that he had never engaged in a direct-action protest considered “well-timed” by those unscarred by segregation. For years the Negro had heard the word “Wait!” and “Wait” had nearly always meant “Never.”
“We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights,” King wrote. “The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television;…when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: ‘Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?’ when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white‘ and ‘colored’ when your first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John,’ and your wife and mother are never given the respected title of ‘Mrs.’ when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait….
“You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws,” King went on. “This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: ‘How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?’ The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that ‘an unjust law is no law at all.’
“Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? 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. 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. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an ‘I-it’ relationship for an ‘I-thou’ relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation,’his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.”
King wanted to make two honest confessions to his “Christian and Jewish brothers.” First, King was deeply disappointed in the white moderate of the South. He was “the Negro’s greatest stumbling block in his stride toward freedom,” because the white moderate preferred order to justice and with his cries of “Wait” paternalistically set a timetable for another man’s freedom. “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will,” King said.
“I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
“In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t t
his like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.”
The clergymen spoke of King’s activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first, he said, he was disappointed that fellow clerics should regard his nonviolent efforts as extreme. He pointed out that he stood between two opposing forces in the Negro community. On one side were the forces of complacency that had adjusted to segregation. On the other were the forces of hatred and bitterness, which found expression in black nationalist groups like Elijah Muhammad’s Black Muslims, “who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible ‘devil.’ ” Through nonviolence, King said, he had tried to offer an alternative to the “do-nothingism” of the complacent Negro and the hate and despair of the black nationalist. He had tried to channel the Negro’s legitimate and healthy discontent into the “creative outlet” of nonviolence. But “if our white brothers dismiss as ‘rabble-rousers’ and ‘outside agitators’ those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies—a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare….
“Let me take note of my other major disappointment,” King wrote. “I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.
Let the Trumpet Sound Page 29