Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation

More praise for Gospel of Freedom

"Jonathan Rieder’s extraordinary analysis establishes the ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ as the most important document of the 20th century. For anyone interested in justice, Gospel of Freedom is a must-read."

—Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, former chief of staff to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"For those of us who fought the fight for freedom in Birmingham, Jonathan Rieder’s Gospel of Freedom brings alive the extraordinary events of 1963 with insight and eloquence. With the help of rare recordings, he powerfully evokes what it felt like and sounded like to hear Martin speaking—when despondent, indignant, or joyous. Above all, Rieder beautifully captures the spirit of fierce but loving defiance that was key not just to Martin’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ but all our efforts to transform America into a vital democracy."

—Ambassador Andrew Young

Rieder’s middle chapters include richly detailed interpretations revealing King’s brilliance as an advocate for equality. He portrays King the diplomat as a patient teacher who later transformed into a raging Old Testament prophet who forcefully condemned racism … This book’s significance lies in its interpretation of the letter, which was itself published later in 1963, and its insights into the often inscrutable King.

—Karl Helicher, Library Journal

Rieder boldly hoists before us a more nearly complete Martin Luther King Jr. whose profound appeals to nonviolence were balanced by equally aggressive calls to resist the spiritual corruption and institutionalized racism of American society.

—Edward Gilbreath, The Christian Century

‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ has been long overshadowed by Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Now Jonathan Rieder has written a vital book that gives the Birmingham letter its due as a piece of sacred literature in the long war against Jim Crow. A compelling book.

—Jon Meacham, author of American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House and Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

An inspired work that belongs in every English-language library … [Full of] illuminating revelations.

—Charles Shea Lemone, The Roanoke Times

A fresh perspective on Dr. King’s message … What distinguishes this work is the author’s close reading of King’s letter and his explorations of its origins and aftermath … By analyzing the ‘Letter’ as both literature and moral imperative, Rieder adds to his subject’s considerable legacy.

—Kirkus Reviews

Reveals a more complex King, tough and tender, in equal measure. Rieder’s narrative reflects a major shift in the way many historians now understand the African American freedom struggle … Deeply informed by his knowledge of King’s speeches and other writings, Rieder’s meticulous reading of the ‘Letter’ is invigorating … Rieder sketches the ‘Letter’s’ career in inspiring activists from the Czech Republic and Poland to South Africa and China.

—New Republic

"Beautifully written and deeply illuminating, Gospel of Freedom is the rare book that engages both the general reader and scholarly specialists. It’s a lesson in using the art of close reading to reveal the complexity of historical context. Rieder allows us to see the world through the King’s eyes, a feat worth celebrating."

—Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, African American Studies, and American Studies, Yale University

Rieder’s investigation offers fresh and critical analysis of the ‘Letter’ and its author … By including these interesting and contrasting images of King—the high-minded, charismatic preacher, the angry and impatient movement leader, the anxious and sometimes melancholy servant, and the faithful and courageous steward—Rieder delivers a King we all can relate to.

—The Post and Courier

Rieder … displays a remarkably deep knowledge of King’s larger body of work, with cross-references and connections to other sermons and writings. Perhaps the most powerful and instructive of these comparisons is in relation to the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, given a few months after the letter was penned.

—Publishers Weekly

With freedom songs and racist chants rising off the pages like steam from summer streets, Jonathan Rieder’s stirring stage setting for King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ brims with passion, rage, and fragile hope.

—Melissa Fay Greene, author of Praying for Sheetrock and The Temple Bombing

"Eloquent and prophetic. Rieder does for our uniquely American saint’s ‘Letter’ what St. Augustine did for the letters of St. Paul. Part commentary, part homily, part exhortation to the faithful, Gospel of Freedom reminds us of ‘the fierce urgency of now.’ "

—Rabbi Burton L. Visotzky, Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies, Jewish Theological Seminary

An extraordinary book. Rieder is the first scholar to illuminate the entire breadth and depth of this remarkable document, with uncommon skill and unblinking honesty. No serious student of the African American freedom struggle can afford to overlook this volume.

—Raymond Arsenault, author of Freedom Riders

Brilliant.

—San Antonio Express-News

Contents

  Timeline

  Introduction: The Cry for Justice

  Part One: The Prelude

Chapter One:   Prisoner

  This Is Blasphemy

  Not Enough Negroes Are Ready to Die in Birmingham

  Traitors to Their Race

  Meet Me in Galilee

  Part Two: The Letter

Chapter Two:   Diplomat

My Dear Fellow Clergymen

The Word Wait Rings in the Ear of Every Negro

Everything the Nazis Did Was Legal

Chapter Three: Prophet

I Am an Extremist

What Kind of People Worship Here?

Abused and Scorned Though We May Be

  Part Three: The Aftermath

Chapter Four:  Street Fighter

Now Is the Time

A Child Shall Lead Them

Free at Last?

What Killed These Four Girls?

Epilogue: Words Spoken to Mankind

Acknowledgments

Footnotes

Notes

Appendix: The text of the Letter from Birmingham Jail

A Note on the Author

By the Same Author

For Catherine

Timeline

The image that traveled around the world: At a critical moment for Birmingham and the civil rights movement, the authorities display their brutality. When President John F. Kennedy saw this picture of a police dog mauling a bystander during the protests against segregation, he said that it made him sick. (© Bill Hudson/AP/Corbis)

Introduction

The Cry for Justice

On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., was arrested, booked, and jailed in Birmingham, Alabama. He had violated a court’s injunction against marches during the battle to desegregate that city, a notorious bastion of racist terror. King was convinced that if the movement could triumph there, the walls of Southern segregation would crumble. While behind bars, he wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail. At the very beginning, King declared, Just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own hometown.¹

Smarting from a recent setback in Albany, Georgia, and hungry for a civil rights victory, King had carried that gospel to Birmingham in early 1963. He had envisioned a massive campaign of nonviolent protest that would wield the leverage of an Easter season boycott to integrate Birmingham’s downtown stores. But with the insurgency faltering in the first weeks of April, King needed a dramatic stroke. He decided to court arrest. The authorities obliged and put him behind bars. While in jail, he read a statement in the local newspaper from eight local white clergymen, all self-described racial moderates. They branded King and his colleagues outsiders and extremists, rejected the demonstrations as untimely, and chided the protesters for precipitating violence. The Letter began as King’s retort to the clergymen.

For King’s closest colleagues, the Letter provided nothing less than the moral and philosophical foundations of their movement. Over the next fifty years, the stature of the Letter spread beyond the events that spawned it. It has been hailed as one of our nation’s literary treasures, compared with the Gettysburg Address and Émile Zola’s J’Accuse, and studied in countless college and high school classrooms. The Letter earned King a place alongside Gandhi and Thoreau as a champion of civil disobedience. The influence of its vision of nonviolent direct action rippled across the globe to insurgents in Soweto, Prague, and Beijing. King’s words—the bristling at those who tell the oppressed to wait for a more convenient season, the steely conviction of the irrepressible force of freedom in the world—have resonated among freedom fighters long after the Letter was written.

The Letter’s broad appeal pays homage to the universalist stance in King’s lofty opening: I am in Birmingham because injustice exists here. But King was also there because my people, as he often referred to fellow blacks, were suffering. King’s Christian faith in his Savior’s love for all God’s children suffuses the Letter, but its driving force is black pain and anger. Those twin imperatives match the larger duality of King’s life: action and argument, exhorting blacks and persuading whites. There was always a two-way flow between those two realms: The defiant purpose of the black uprising spilled into the Letter; the Letter’s arguments about iniquity and its remedy flowed back into mass meetings, freedom songs, and marches.

The Birmingham struggle gave rise to events that forever changed our nation. The images from those months in the spring and summer of 1963 are now an indelible part of our national history: the city’s black youth defying the fire hoses and dogs of policemen dispatched to maintain white supremacy; the movement’s leaders galvanizing the protest with rousing sermons and freedom songs like Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around; President John Kennedy addressing the nation in June, finally defining civil rights as an urgent moral issue and national priority; and blacks and whites gathering at the Lincoln Memorial in August for the March on Washington to hear King deliver I Have a Dream.

The battle for civil rights was not finally won in the months King called the long summer of our discontent. The Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination in public accommodations, was not passed until the following year. Black defiance continued to spread across America. Battles with names like St. Augustine and Selma—modern equivalents of Antietam, Gettysburg, and Bull Run—lay ahead. On September 15, 1963, in a racist revenge killing, the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham took the lives of four little black girls. The white backlash was just gathering force in the North. Still, after Birmingham, the foundations of the nation’s old racial order cracked in some elemental way and set the groundwork for the new one we live in today. The Letter from Birmingham Jail, the vision of nonviolence it argued for, and the disinherited children of God it sanctified played a critical part in dismantling Jim Crow.

The Letter merits revisiting today for its historical import alone, but there are other reasons as well. The moral vision that informs it has never seemed more relevant. At a time when Americans often seem preoccupied with their cultural identity, partisan tribe, or social network node, King’s reminder of the Old Testament prophets who took their message into the world beyond their hometowns calls out to us with its claim on sympathies greater than clan, race, and nation. All of the Letter’s subthemes turn on a broader humanistic vision: the duty to cry out for justice for all God’s children, the sin of sitting on the sidelines in the face of suffering, the idea that law should protect the precious worth of every human being.

The Letter is compelling as well on literary grounds. Its swerves and swings are remarkable. One moment it offers reflective argument; the next it crackles with prophetic anger. The poise and politesse of the author dissolve into hints of sarcastic disdain, passive aggression, even self-pity. King drops the names of revered philosophers but leavens his erudition with a voyage into the inner recesses of black vulnerability (When your first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name ‘boy’) and a tour of white America (I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches … [and] found myself asking … Who is their God?). There is also the staccato embrace of extremism, with a sequence of questions and answers that startle like a slap in the face (Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel? ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’).

These varied approaches hint at a third, and perhaps the most compelling, reason to revisit the Letter: It reveals much about its often elusive author. It is a supremely personal work from someone moved, and sometimes riven, by rival impulses: rebuke and forgiveness, love of his race and love of humanity. An expressive man, Martin Luther King often hid his passion behind a mask of dignity.

As we move through the Letter, we witness a striking transformation. In the first half, we are mainly in the presence of a patient and gracious man, who crafts little moments of brotherhood and tries to win over his critics through appeals to their reason, sympathy, and conscience. But around the midpoint, there’s a distinct shift, really a second act. King drops the mask. He begins to speak more bluntly. Instead of explaining himself, he chides and criticizes. He shows himself to be not just a black man but an angry black man. The diplomat gives way to the prophet.

What the prophet reveals upends our popular notions not just of King but of what he believed. He did not think that many whites had much empathy. He grasped the flawed nature of democracy in America. His indignation reached beyond vitriolic racists and the eight clergymen who criticized the Birmingham insurgency. He took aim at the core of American culture, the vast universe of people who imagined themselves to be decent but never dwelled on the shame of American racism. He was not naive about the power of soaring moral rhetoric to change hearts. King did not rest his optimism on faith in the American dream or the ordained nature of freedom in America. Instead, he found solace in his deep love of black people and the exceptional spirit of the slave ancestors. In all these ways, the Letter anticipates the King of the later years who thundered against poverty, racism, and war before he was assassinated in 1968.

Ultimately, the Letter challenges us and what we believe about our own nation and its mythology of perfection and the halting, often grudging way we went about redressing that primal flaw of slavery and all the forms of racism that succeeded it.

In my own efforts to make sense of the Letter, I have relied heavily on recordings of King’s own voice, particularly his addresses at mass meetings at Birmingham’s black churches right before and after he went to jail. In these settings, he often revealed less varnished versions of his beliefs and feelings. The source material includes a trove of CDs made available only relatively recently at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. One of them contains a barely known postjail speech in which King preached an extraordinary, essentially black version of the Letter, which qualified and retracted aspects of what he had said to the white clergy.²

In truth, the Letter was less formal rhetoric or a philosophical treatise than a transcribed form of oral culture. King’s brilliance was always as a master of the spoken word; that is why listening to him is so important. Moreover, the Letter was a mélange of riffs, samples, stories, gambits, and allusions, many of which came from his addresses to black people. Without a deep knowledge of those addresses, it is easy to miss the import of a fleeting allusion to the slave ancestors here or a small clue there that indicates King is preaching under the guise of writing. Andrew Young, the former ambassador to the United Nations, King’s close colleague in SCLC, and a key figure in the Birmingham uprising, observes, The only way Martin could have answered [the clergymen] was in writing. But if he had been given a chance to go preach [the Letter] to them, he probably would have done that. King, he says, was like Jeremiah, with fire pent up in his bones, and that’s the way this letter was. It just spewed forth.³

To understand the Letter, it is necessary to place it in its immediate historical context. Part One sets the scene. My aim here is not to document every aspect of the Birmingham movement, a job that has been ably accomplished by others.⁴ It is to chart the events that landed King behind bars and provoked his rising outrage and disappointment and to introduce the distinctive brand of prophetic Christianity that animated him and his colleagues.

The two chapters of Part Two focus on the Letter itself. Chapter two, Diplomat, explores King’s careful and reasonable efforts in the first half of the Letter to convince whites of the legitimacy of direct action and black impatience. Chapter three, Prophet, explores the critical shift that emerges in the second half of the Letter and the dramatic revelations that ensue when King drops the stance of dispassionate reason. As we shall discover, King was telling the man in ways that shared much with Malcolm X’s excoriations of whites.

Part Three turns to The Aftermath. Chapter four, Street Fighter, tracks King as he leaves the jail and rejoins the insurgency as it applied the arguments of the Letter and eventually won the day; traces the impact of Birmingham on the Kennedy administration and on King’s delivery of I Have a Dream at the March on Washington; and examines that bitter finale, the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. What killed these girls? an angry King will ask. In keeping with the heavy load of personal responsibility to act that is central to his gospel of freedom, he refuses to exempt either silent whites or disengaged blacks from culpability.

The epilogue explores the biography of the Letter as it moved out into the world. I consider the response to the Letter by the journals of opinion that championed it, by some of the white clergymen whose criticism evoked it, and by King’s colleagues whose entire lives in the movement embodied it. I close with a look at the ultimate testimony to the Letter’s universality: the students and teachers who continue to be drawn to its literary power and moral indignation; and the protest movements across the globe that still are stirred by its cry for justice.

As we look back at those volatile months in 1963 and consider the arc of history that leads from Birmingham to the election of the first black president and beyond, it is hard not to wonder what King would make of all the elegies to postracial America. It will become clear when we examine the Letter and I Have a Dream in the light of the Letter that King had a more ambivalent relation to the national story than is suggested by his occasional invocation of the American dream or the picture of him presented in textbooks or on the national holiday in his name. On the night before his assassination, he reassured his listeners: We as a people will get there. He really meant people as the black nation within a nation. He read American history as an outsider looking in, even as he claimed a right to belong and selectively used America’s civil religious imagery when it suited him. He also read our history as a realist who harbored no illusions about the repressive powers and the depth of racism he was up against. Nothing in the Letter, nothing in the bedlam of Birmingham or its bittersweet aftermath, suggest that King viewed America as a providential nation whose destiny was freedom. Rather, that exceptional nation first had to be created by the exceptionally brave and spiritual people of the civil rights movement.

That the Letter from Birmingham Jail was ultimately a black man’s cry for black freedom does not mean King ever lost his empathy for all God’s children. The gospel of freedom is a demanding one. At the March on Washington, King imagined a white interrogator asking, When will you be satisfied? King’s answer applied universally: not until justice rolls down like waters.

PART ONE

The Prelude

Bound for jail: On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth (left), Rev. Ralph Abernathy (center), and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (right) violate Birmingham’s injunction against marches. King and Abernathy were soon arrested and taken to the city jail. (Birmingham, Ala. Public Library Archives, File # 1125.11.20A-1)

Chapter One

Prisoner

This is Blasphemy

The Letter from Birmingham Jail wasn’t born in the isolation of a jail cell. All the key subplots of the Letter were hatched—most of the themes and even phrases had been anticipated and delivered¹—in the eighteen months preceding Martin Luther King’s jailing: the rising defiance of black Americans; the battle between the fierce immediacy of now and the resistance of dilatory whites and reluctant Negroes; the clash between an engaged church and one cowering behind stained glass windows; the tension between disappointment and the faith that the Lord will make a way out of no way; the duty to respond to suffering humanity’s cry for help and the willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice that it often required in the Deep South. As King told an aroused mass meeting in Albany, Georgia, They can put you in jail and transform you to glory; if they try to kill you, develop a willingness to die.²

The Albany Movement had launched a full-fledged assault on segregation in that sleepy farm town in the fall of 1961. King came to Albany in response to a plea from the local movement’s leader, Dr. William Anderson, his former Morehouse College classmate, which basically boiled down to this: Somebody needs you, Lord, Come by here. As King pulled up in front of Albany’s Shiloh Baptist Church (and Zion Baptist Church right across the street) on December 15, 1961, the signature sounds of the Albany Movement rang out through the night. Fifteen hundred people had been waiting for the grand leader, some for hours, their spirits lifted by fervent prayer and the rapturous power of freedom songs like I’m so glad / We’re fighting to be free / Singing glory hallelujah! / I’m so glad.³

King made his way up to the pulpit through faces transfixed, and a great shout went out: one sustained cry of joy and welcome as, everyone on his feet, the people waved their arms to him, and he waved back. Then they turned back to song, improvising verses of Amen, but replacing it with Free-Dom: Martin King says freedom / Martin King says freedom / Martin King says freedom, and then the chorus, Free-dom! Free-dom!, until the song switched, seamlessly, into I woke up this morning / With my mind / SET on freedom.⁴

King’s Albany venture came at a charged time for the grand leader and the civil rights movement at large. Six years had passed since the bus boycott he led in Montgomery, Alabama, had anointed him the black leader and catapulted him onto the cover of Time magazine. What did he have to show for it? He was still searching to define a mission for himself and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the organization he had helped create in 1957 to