Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  But it would never be a simple or straightforward thing to explain or defend, as Lee herself knew all too well. White southerners lived in a moral thicket of their own making, and it was easy to lose one’s way. That’s what happened to the ministers in their follow-up letter in April. They used that same phrase, “law and order,” to urge an end to black protests, thereby equating George Wallace’s defiance of federal courts with the civil disobedience of King and his followers. Yet Wallace was protesting the right to segregate, and subjugate, blacks, while King was protesting the laws that subjugated him and his people.

  Policemen arresting Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy in Birmingham, Alabama, April 12, 1963. (Associated Press)

  This misjudged second letter—not the first one that gave hell to George Wallace—was the one for which the men would be remembered. In fact, they came to face a peculiar kind of infamy. For the same day that their second missive was published, Martin Luther King was arrested and sent to the Birmingham Jail. It was there, several days later, that he read the men’s statement, and decided that he would write a letter of his own.

  IF THERE IS any document from the civil rights–era South more widely read than To Kill a Mockingbird, it is Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” King began writing it in the margins of the newspaper in which the eight ministers’ statement had appeared. A friendly prison trusty supplied him with scraps of paper on which he expanded his thoughts. King’s lawyers carried the fragments back to SCLC headquarters for staff to assemble. In its explication of just and unjust law, its condemnation of racism and the moral callousness of white America, and its analysis of the political and moral costs of continued indifference, King’s letter would take its place in history alongside Paine’s Common Sense, or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, as an essential document of American democracy. In the years to come it would inspire millions of freedom-seeking people around the world, from Johannesburg to Gdansk to Tiananmen Square.

  It began, however, as a polite, professional response to the objections of King’s fellow clergymen. King patiently explained why he had come to Birmingham. He was the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he wrote, which had an affiliate in Birmingham that had asked him and his organization for help. He had come because it was his professional duty, but even more, he had come for the same reason that Paul had come to the aid of the Macedonians. Injustice in Birmingham was a threat to justice everywhere, according to King, echoing the universalist principle that the religious leaders themselves had offered in their January statement. His fellow ministers may deplore the demonstrations, King wrote, yet they said nothing about the conditions that precipitated them: the police brutality, the rigged judicial system, the unsolved and unpunished bombings of homes and churches. Earlier negotiations had resulted in promises by Birmingham merchants that had gone unmet. What else were King and his colleagues to do? Negotiation may be preferable to protest, but in every instance in his people’s long struggle, protests had been the only means for blacks to win genuine negotiations.

  King’s defense of the protests included a gallery of indelible images: children witnessing the lynching of mothers and fathers; the “hate-filled” policemen kicking and cursing; the “airtight cage of poverty”; the “degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness.’” He also described a scene that Harper Lee had evoked in Mockingbird, that of a father confronted by young children asking the most innocent and impossible of questions. Only, unlike Atticus, King had no answer for why colored children couldn’t go to the amusement park, no soothing words to clear the “ominous clouds of inferiority” slowly forming in his daughter’s “mental sky,” no tender wisdom for his son about why white people were so mean to colored people.

  One of the most famous passages was King’s condemnation of white moderates, those decent, well-meaning defenders of 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.

  King explained that he had “almost” reached this regrettable conclusion—that the moderates were worse than the reactionaries. He wasn’t all the way there yet. And he still wouldn’t be a year later when he revised the “Letter” and included it in his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait. He made numerous small emendations in language and emphasis from the version of the letter first published in May 1963 to the one published in his book, but he kept that important qualifier, “almost.” It’s important to understand why. That “almost” is evidence of King’s own ambivalence about the decent white southerners that Harper Lee represented, both in her person and in her fiction.

  On the level of practical politics, it’s clear that King didn’t truly believe that moderates were bigger stumbling blocks to him and his movement than Councilors and Klansmen. If he had, he never would have delayed the start of the protests in hopes of helping Albert Boutwell defeat Bull Connor. King had no illusions that Boutwell would “bring the millennium to Birmingham,” as he wrote in his letter. Boutwell was a segregationist, just like Connor. Yet King knew that not all segregationists were the same.

  In 1957, for example, King cultivated a relationship with the Tuscaloosa newspaper editor Buford Boone, the Pulitzer Prize winner for his editorials denouncing the Citizens’ Council’s role in the riots at the University of Alabama. Boone was a southern conservative and a segregationist. Unlike some of his fellow southern editors of the era, whose battles with militant reactionaries pushed them to the left politically, Boone remained a solid man of the right. In 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson invited him to serve on an advisory committee to the Community Relations Service, which had been established as part of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Boone declined. He pledged to use his newspaper to “promote respect for law and order and a proper regard for human rights as well as individual freedoms,” yet he “conscientiously believe[d] certain portions of the Civil Rights Bill violate the letter and spirit of our Constitution.” He hoped that “they will be declared unconstitutional at an early date.”

  After the announcement of Boone’s Pulitzer in May 1957, King wrote him a letter of glowing praise. King had had “unspeakable admiration” for Boone ever since he had read Boone’s editorial denouncing the Councils earlier that year. He praised him for his “moral courage,” “profound dignity,” and willingness to “sacrifice and even face abuse for the cause of freedom and truth.” He hoped other white southerners would “rise up and courageously give to the type of leadership that you have given.” King was convinced that “this is no day for the rabble rouser, whether he be Negro or white.” His conclusion had the rousing tone of his sermons: “[T]hose of us who stand amid the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man are given new hope for the emerging daybreak of freedom and justice when we know that such persons as you live in our great nation and in our great southland.”

  If King’s praise seems excessive, especially when contrasted with his harsh words about the defenders of law and order in his “Letter,” this owed in part to what had changed in the intervening years. In May 1957, Alabama was still in the midst of militant segregationists’ hostile takeover. Boone’s willingness to speak out at that early point required more moral courage than such stands would later. King’s criticism of the moderate ministers
of Birmingham in 1963 came at a moment when he was being criticized from nearly all sides for raining on Albert Boutwell’s parade. He had to remind these moderate whites what had and had not actually taken place in Birmingham.

  King did offer a bit of flattery in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” when he praised another group of white southerners, one that had “grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it.” Or, at least, one of those listed, Lillian Smith, would have seen this as flattery. Smith’s name appeared second behind that of Ralph McGill, the distinguished editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution. Smith had locked horns with McGill for years, criticizing him in the exact terms that King used to denounce white moderates. In fact, King’s critique of moderates was anticipated by Smith by more than a decade in her book Killers of the Dream. “It is hard to decide which is more harmful to men’s morals,” she wrote, “the ‘moderate’ or reactionary, in this confused South.” Moderates, Smith said, were “those who spoke for law and order but would not speak against the segregation that threatened law and order; they would protest the lynching of men’s bodies but not the lynching of their spirits; they opposed the mob on the street but not the mob in men’s minds; they wanted laws obeyed but would not defend the moral values on which law is grounded.”

  King’s solicitation of figures like Boone and McGill was shrewd. It sampled from the hard-earned experience of southern blacks in the Jim Crow era, when, as King wrote, “Negroes defended themselves and protected their jobs—and, in many cases, their lives—by perfecting an air of ignorance and agreement.” But it was rooted also in King’s experience as a Christian, and in the charge that Jesus gave to his disciples in Matthew, a passage that King invoked at staff retreats to inspire his fellow soldiers in the cause of justice: “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.”

  It was with the innocence of doves that King addressed his fellow clergymen in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” It is vital to hear in that document the voice of the Reverend Martin Luther King. To whatever degree it was a philosophical or political tract intended to persuade, King’s “Letter” was also a sermon written to redeem. His fellow Christian ministers would have recognized the idiom immediately, because they would have relied on it themselves in their own ministries to challenge the procrastinators and the prevaricators among their flock. King’s “Letter” recalled the prophetic warning to the church in Laodicea received as part of the Revelation to John of Patmos: “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.”

  Indeed, King wrote his letter precisely because he believed that these fellow men of the cloth could be converted. He accepted that their criticisms were “sincerely set forth,” however wrongheaded they might be, and he answered their objections with equal sincerity. He condemned not just the white moderate, but also the white church. He described how on his travels throughout the South he often drove by the beautiful churches with their lofty spires and massive education buildings nearby, and wondered to himself, “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?” Yet King wrote not just to persuade, or even to sway these men morally. He wrote that they might be convicted—that the Holy Spirit might work within them to soften their hearts and open their eyes, so that seeing the error of their ways, they might repent.

  Most of the men never did. A few bore a sense of grievance for the rest of their lives. They felt like they were among the tiny handful of white Alabamans willing to speak out in a terrible, tumultuous moment, yet King had mischaracterized them, and had used them for his own purposes. Particularly galling to several would have been King’s rhetorical question near the end of the letter asking where religious leaders had been “when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred?” These eight clergymen, of course, had been at the front of the line denouncing Wallace.

  But a few of them did hear King’s message, and they did repent. Earl Stallings, the pastor of Birmingham’s First Baptist Church, and the one clergyman King mentioned by name for having welcomed black worshipers at his church, held firm against hardline segregationists among his flock who tried to reverse his open-door policy, and, failing that, to run him out of the church. In May 1963, Stallings preached a blistering sermon, “Pilate’s Wash Bowl,” reminding his congregation of how the Roman governor of Judea had absolved himself of personal responsibility for the injustices of his day. “Ah, Pilate, we condemn you because your position, your security, meant more to you than truth,” Stallings said. “But, are we any better? We hear the call of truth, of righteousness, of justice, but we are not men enough to heed its challenge. Selfishness, caution, expediency, opportunism, all together slam shut the doors and we never cross the threshold of truth, of freedom, of justice.”

  The Catholic priest Joseph Durick was another. As part of a religious minority in the South, Durick had long had a heart for those at society’s margins. But King’s letter was instrumental in convincing him that segregation was not merely a political problem, but a moral one, with grave implications for the church. In 1966 he was appointed the bishop of the diocese of Tennessee, which covered the entire state, and took prophetic stands on issues of racial and economic inequality. In 1968, during the strike of black sanitation workers in Memphis, Bishop Durick donated $1,000 to feed the families of striking workers, which provoked a sharp rebuke from the city’s mayor. Two days after King was assassinated in Memphis on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, Durick led a local interfaith service honoring King as a prophet of “dignity and freedom” for all people. Reading aloud the passage from King’s letter condemning white moderates, Durick asked God to “examine our individual conscience—to assess my part of the blame in the death of Dr. King.” He dedicated himself to “work to make our morality meaningful—as with greater vigor we translate it into the social power structure and into living laws and social institutions.”

  BUT MOST OF that was still to come. King expanded on the themes in “Letter” in Why We Can’t Wait, published in June 1964. The text was written largely by a ghostwriter, Al Duckett, and later approved by King with input from Stanley Levison, the former communist whose closeness to the minister the FBI had used to obtain a warrant to wiretap Levison, and eventually King himself. The book told the story of the Birmingham campaign. One chapter was a slightly revised version of “Letter.” Another, titled “The Sword That Heals,” represented King’s most urgent defense to date of nonviolence. It was a response to the increasing pressure King felt from the rising black nationalist movement. Rather than a replacement for the legal attack on Jim Crow, nonviolence was only a supplement, he explained. It showed the “sophistication” of the freedom movement because it broke with Americans’ “old, ingrained concepts,” rooted in the frontier tradition, the eye-for-an-eye philosophy valorized as “the highest measure of American manhood,” and the heroes “who champion justice through violent retaliation against injustice.”

  Running counter to this outdated philosophy, King argued, was “something in the American ethos that responds to the strength of moral force.” And who for King was an example of an American responding to moral force? None other than Atticus Finch himself. King wrote,

  I am reminded of the popular and widely respected novel and film To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus Finch, a white southern lawyer, confronts a group of his neighbors who have become a lynch-crazed mob, seeking the life of his Negro client. Finch, armed with nothing more lethal than a lawbook, disperses the mob with the force of his moral courage, aided by his small daughter, who, innocently calling the would-be lynchers by name, reminds them that they are individual men, not a pack of beasts.

  What Abraham Lincoln had done for Harriet Beecher Stowe when, as legend has it, he referred to her as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” Martin Luther King did for H
arper Lee in invoking her most famous character as the example for those Americans who might yet do what’s right.

  Whether it was actually Scout helping Atticus or the other way around wasn’t important. What was important was King’s enduring faith in the strength of moral force. This, it must be remembered, was always the counterbalance to his cynicism about white moderates. In his nod to Atticus Finch, as in his appeals to Buford Boone and other white moderates in earlier years, King signaled his belief that within the oppressor race were people with the modicum of decency and empathy without which democratic change is impossible. King didn’t know for certain when he wrote his book—before civil rights forces in Congress broke a southern filibuster for the first time in American history, and Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act—whether there were enough moral white people in America to defeat the legalized subjugation of black southerners through peaceful, nonviolent, legislative means. But he believed it to be true, and through his belief, and the belief of millions of others inspired by him, it became true.

  Even before the historic legislation of 1964, King had seen enough to confirm his faith in the power of moral witness. “The striking thing about the nonviolent crusade of 1963 was that so few felt the sting of bullets or the clubbing of billies and nightsticks,” he wrote in Why We Can’t Wait. “[T]he Revolution was a comparatively bloodless one.” He wrote this in spite of the evil, cowardly murder of the four girls at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in spite of the bombing in Birmingham of his own brother’s home and of the motel room where it was assumed he would be staying, in spite of the death threats he had received for years and would continue to receive until he himself was killed by another racist murderer.