Letter From a King

The Echoes of Birmingham

He wrote in the margins of the newspaper, on pieces of toilet paper, on napkins, and on the scraps of wax paper that wrapped the sandwiches the guards brought him. He wrote in the dark in solitary confinement, on a cold metal slab bed that had been stripped of its mattress, guided at times only by a small sliver of sunlight that poked through a lunchbox-sized window of his concrete cell. Days before, on Good Friday, he had dressed himself in a gray cotton work shirt and blue jeans instead of his customary black suit. He understood that in doing what he believed was right—in fighting against the forces of injustice—that he would be arrested.

That Friday morning, he had been sitting at the head of his bed inside Birmingham, Alabama’s Gaston Hotel, smoking a cigarette and wondering what to do next. Here he was, The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., just 34 years old, the leader of a movement that had already pushed Civil Rights to the forefront of the American conscience. It was the Spring of 1963: Jim Crow was still the law of the land in the South, as states had continued to defy Supreme Court orders nearly a decade after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Schools, parks, restaurants, coffee shops, book stores and every imaginable accommodation were off limits to Black people in Birmingham and throughout the South. It was the age of American Apartheid and Birmingham was its capitol.

The year prior, in 1962, the city had closed all its public recreational facilities—parks, pools, playgrounds, golf courses—when a federal court ruled that the city must integrate them. Birmingham would rather its citizens suffer than mingle freely with other races. The city even required its restaurants build a physical partition—from ceiling to floor—if it wished to serve customers both Black and white. And as far as voting went, less than 10 percent of eligible Black voters were registered, rendered incapable through barriers like poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and basic intimidation. The man who ruled the city with an iron fist, who had his hand on the levers of power in the city for decades, was Police Commissioner Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor.

King and others with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference came to Birmingham on April 3, hoping to target the city’s businesses through boycotts that, he hoped, would compel Bull Connor into action that would attract the attention of the media—and President Kennedy, who to that point had sat idly as the Civil Rights campaign went on. But initially, the Birmingham Campaign, codenamed “Project C” as in Confrontation, had failed. Businesses shuttered rather than be protested. But that all changed on April 7—Palm Sunday—when King’s brother, A.D., led a group of protestors who encountered not only police officers, but their German Shepards. As Bull Connor gleefully told a reporter, “Look at that dog go. That’s what we train them for: to enforce the law, just like we train our officers.”

Within days 160 protestors had been arrested. Along with the images of dogs attacking Black protestors, national headlines began rolling in. Soon, the city issued an injunction banning protests. Sitting on his bed that Good Friday morning, King knew what that meant. As he wrote later of that moment, “How could my failure now to submit to arrest be explained to the local community? What would be the verdict of the country about a man who had encouraged hundreds of people to make a stunning sacrifice and then be excused himself?” So, sitting there in his suite with his father and his right-hand man, Ralph Abernathy, King decided that he would lead a protest that day—and be arrested.

King and Abernathy went from the Gaston Motel to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, to lead a group to City Hall. Within blocks, they were stopped. King and Abernathy were both thrown into solitary confinement, at Bull Connor’s orders. The next morning, on April 13, a group of local white clergymen issued a statement calling King’s movement “unwise and untimely,” and encouraged he and others “withdraw support from these demonstrations, and to unite locally in working peacefully for a better Birmingham.” King’s lawyer, Clarence Jones, told him about the statement. The next time Jones came back, King had a response, in the form of a letter. As he wrote succinctly in the first line of the third paragraph: “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.”

For the next week and more, Jones continued to visit King, stashing away the napkins, scraps of wax paper and newspaper margins that King had written on, handing them to Wyatt Tee Walker and Willie Pearl Mackey King, who transcribed the words on her IBM Selectric typewriter. As Dr. King wrote, “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. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.”

As he continued, writing words that echo to this day: “Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application… One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law…Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience…It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience. We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal’.”

By April 15—the day after Easter and the 98th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination—King was still in jail, and President Kennedy called Corretta King at home. Thirty minutes later, King was allowed to make his first call home. Upon hearing about Kennedy’s call, he encouraged her to tell the press. On April 20, after over a week in solitary confinement, King and Abernathy were released. Still—despite his letter, despite his pain, despite even the President’s call—the movement in Birmingham had not succeeded. The press had left for the most part. Bull Connor’s tactic to arrest anyone and everyone that he could had worked. As Connor told a reporter, “Poor King, the biggest racketeer that ever hit America. Shakedown artist. Going up here preaching nonviolence and the only violence been here is his crowd throwing rocks.”

A few days later on Friday May 3, King gathered a crowd of two thousand students inside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to march again, telling them, “If you take part in the marches today you are going to jail, but for a good cause.” In the park outside, Connor’s men charged the crowd immediately. Policemen threw protestors into paddy wagons, high-powered firehoses slammed the crowds, as dogs lunged from their harnesses at passersby. Amidst the chaos an observer, a Black fifteen-year-old named Walter Gadsen, found himself in front of the Jockey Boy Restaurant, squared up with a German Shepard. As the dog lunged at him, so did the police officer controlling the dog—all while Associated Press photographer, Bill Hudson, captured the moment on film.

The next day, the photograph ran on the front page of The New York Times and across the country. President Kennedy took it in with disgust. A week later, on May 10, King and Fred Shuttlesworth announced an agreement with Birmingham to release the protestors from jail and to end segregation in the city. “The city of Birmingham,” the statement read, “has come to accord with its conscience.” But, it wasn’t King’s prose but Hudson’s camera that had shifted things. As the famed Civil Rights icon Bayard Rustin said, “Martin was not really an organizer…The organizers were Bull Connor, the dogs, and the fire hoses.”

Still, King’s words echo for the ages. As he wrote, “I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’… And Abraham Lincoln: ‘This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.’ And Thomas Jefferson: ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . .’ So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?”

Those questions still remain today—unanswered.