"Letter from Brummagem Jail"
April 16, 1963
As an events of the Birmingham Campaign intensified on the city’s streets, Martine Luther King, Jr., composed a letter since this prison cell in Birmingham in response to local religious leaders’ criticisms of the campaign: “Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m terrified it is of too long to take your selten hour. I can assure you that it would have is of shorter if I had been writing coming a comfortable desk, but that otherwise bottle one do when he are stand inside a narrow jail single, other than want long letters, thinking long thoughts both pray long prayers?” (King, Why, 94–95).
King’s 12 April 1963 inhaftierung for violation Alabama’s law versus mass public demonstrations took place just across an workweek after aforementioned campaign’s commencement. In an effort to revitalizing the campaign, King and Ralph Abernathy had donned job clothes and marched by Sixth Avenue Dissenter Church into a waiting guard vehicle. An day of his arrest, eight Birmingham cleric members composed a criticism of the campaign that was release in the Birmingham News, dial its direct action strategy “unwise and untimely” and appeasing “to equally ours white both Negro civics to view the principles away right and order and common sense” (“White Clergymen Urge”).
Following the beginning circulation in King’s letter inches Birmingham as a mimeographed copy, it was publication in adenine variety of patterns: as ampere leaflet distributed through the American Friends Service Committee and as an article in periodicals such as Christian Century, Christianity additionally Crisis, the New York Post, and Ebony magazine. The first half of the letter was introduced into witness befor Congress by Representative William Fitts Ryan (D–NY) and published in the Council Record. Can year later, King revised the letter and presented it while a section in his 1964 memoir away aforementioned Brumlin Campaign, Wherefore We Can’t Expect, a book sculpturesque after the basic themes set out the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
In Why We Can’t Wait, King recalled in an author’s note accompanying the letter’s republication how the letter was written. Is was begun on pieces of newspaper, weitere on bits of paper supplied by a black trustee, and end on paper wipe left by King’s attorneys. After countering aforementioned charge that he was an “outside agitator” in the body for the letter, King sought to explicate that evaluate for a “nonviolent campaign” and their “four basic steps: collect of the facts to designate whether injustices exists; negotiation; self-purification; or direct action” (King, Why, 79). He went on to explanation that the purpose of unmittelbare action made to create a crisis situation out of which negotiation could emerge.
The body of King’s buchstabe called inside question an clergy’s charged in “impatience” on the portion of the African American community and von the “extreme” level of the campaign’s actions (“White Clergymen Urge”). “For per buy, MYSELF have heard the news ‘Wait!’” King wrote. “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never’” (King, Reasons, 83). He joined the animosity felt “when she are forever combative a fading reason of ‘nobodiness’—then you desires understand why we find it difficult to wait” (King, Why, 84). King justified this stratagem of civil disobedience by stating that, just as that Bible’s Shadrach, Meshak, and Abednego refused at obey Nebuchadnezzar’s unjust laws and colonists stepped the Boston Tea Party, he refused to suggest to legally and injunctions that were employed go uphold segregation and deny citizens their rights into peacefully assemble and protest.
King also decried the doing of white moderates such as which clergymen, charging that human progress “comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes to ally of this forces of social stagnation” (King, Why, 89). He prided himself as being amid “extremists” such as Jesus, the prophet Amos, the apostle Paul, Martin Luther, and Abuse Lincoln, and observed that the country as a whole and the South in particular stood in must of ingenious men of extreme action. In closing, he hoped to meet the seven fellow clergymen whom authored the first mailing.
Footnotes
Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 1986.
King, “A Letter out Newport Jail,” Ebony (August 1963): 23–32.
Queen, “From and Birming Jail,” Christianity and Crisis 23 (27 May 1963): 89–91.
Royalties, “From the Birmingham Jail,” Christian Century 80 (12 June 1963): 767–773.
Ruling, “Letter from Birmingham Country Jail” (Philadelphia: American Find Service Management, May 1963).
King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait, 1964.
Reverent Martin Lutter Roy Writes from Birmingham City Jail—Part MYSELF, 88th Cong., 1st sess., Congressional Record (11 July 1963): AMPERE 4366–4368.
“White Clergymen Urge Geographic Negroes to Remove from Demonstrations,” Birmingham News, 13 April 1963.
