Overview
Martin Luther King, Jr. rarely had time to answer his critics. But on April 16, 1963, he was confined to the Birmingham jail, serving a sentence for participating in civil rights demonstrations. "Alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell," King pondered a letter that fellow clergymen had published urging him to drop his campaign of nonviolent resistance and to leave the battle for racial equality to the courts. In response, King drafted his most extensive and forceful written statement against social injustice - a remarkable essay that focused the world's attention on Birmingham and spurred the famous March on Washington. Bristling with the energy and resonance of his great speeches, Letter from the Birmingham Jail is both a compelling defense of nonviolent demonstration and a rallying cry for an end to social discrimination that is just as powerful today as it was more than twenty years ago.Editorials
Sacred Fire
Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail was written while the civil rights leader was serving a sentence for spearheading the mass protest demonstrations of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. In it, King responds to a group of white Alabama religious leaders who had publicly urged him to limit his activities to local and federal courts. The religious leaders accused King and his Southern Christian Leadership Council of being "outside agitators" whose peaceful resistance could serve to incite further civil disturbance and rioting. King's letter from prison, which incisively laid out his brilliant counter-argument, was one of the definitive writings of the civil rights era: It codified the methods of direct-action civil disobedience and offered a vigorous defense of its theological and moral foundations.King's letter first laid to rest the idea that he was ever an "outside agitator"; how could anyone be an outsider to the cause of humanity? He framed the civil rights struggle as the vital struggle for human rights and godly justice on earth. He drew on biblical parallels and the writings of Christian thinkers, especially St. Thomas Aquinas, to make the point that not all laws enacted by humans are just by a divine standard. King was particularly harsh on these religious leaders for their desire to quiet him and others in order to preserve a facade of peace and civil tranquillity at the expense of true social justice. King could not imagine a Christianity that sanctioned, through inaction, oppression and prejudice against any of God's human creations.
Like the epistles of the Christian apostle Paul, the moral urgency of King's letter was only increased by the circumstances of its composition: In an author's note to the published edition: of his letter, King wrote: "This response to a published statement ... was composed under somewhat constricting circumstances. Begun on the margins of the newspaper in which the statement appeared while I was in jail, the letter was continued on scraps of writing paper supplied by a friendly Negro trustee, and concluded on a pad my attorneys were eventually permitted to leave me." The publication of Letter from a Birmingham Jail was pivotal in influencing public opinion in favor of the civil rights movement, and it caused the movement to receive both greater participation and greater financial support. Today, it is a reminder of the moral and religious imperatives that drove the 1960s civil rights movement and its brilliant leader.