Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Jill Frame
January 16, 2022
Good morning, Friends. Instead of scripture today, I’d like to read to you an excerpt from “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”
There is something about history that conveys a feeling of inevitability.
So, it is easy to look back at Martin Luther King Jr. sitting in a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, in April 1963, pencil stub in hand, and imagine him confidently writing what he knew would be a work for the ages, words that would propel one of the most successful social justice campaigns in history and be proclaimed by presidents, recited by elementary school students, emblazoned on billboards and greeting cards.
I read some of those words to you today from King’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” to remind us that the truth is far different. In fact, the 34-year-old preacher who landed in a bleak cell on Good Friday was unsure whether the act of civil disobedience that brought him there – trumped up charges of violating a parade ordinance – had made any difference at all.
The Civil Rights movement was still young and had turned to its most ambitious target yet. Bombingham- a moniker for Birmingham at the time- was a contradiction: a fast-growing city and a town where racial segregation and the indignities of Jim Crow laws were locked in tight. Even though steel-working wages paid to blacks were half those paid to whites, they offered the best jobs around, and few were interested in rocking that boat.
Still, in January 1963 as Governor George Wallace was declaring “segregation now, segregation forever” in Alabama, King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference- or more commonly known as the SCLC- decided to target Birmingham with an economic boycott during the Easter shopping season. *Few* joined in. In fact, many middle-class blacks and about three-quarters of black clergy joined most of the whites in opposing the protests, arguing that the city should be given a chance. After all, they argued, a new mayor had just been elected and they wanted to give him some time to make changes.
According to Jonathan Rieder, a Professor of Sociology at Barnard College, and author of “Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter From Birmingham Jail and the Struggle That Changed a Nation,” It was while sitting in solitary confinement, without food, and with very little community support, King was at one of his lowest points.
King was panicked -- and for good reason. Three years prior, King had been jailed without other SCLC leaders in Atlanta. At one point during his imprisonment, King was put into a straight jacket and driven through the dark of night to the Reedsville prison. During the 3.5 hour drive, King was convinced he was being taken to an unknown location to be killed by the Klu Klux Klan. Now, here he was in Birmingham, once again jailed without other SCLC leaders. He was scared that the same fate awaited him in Birmingham that had in Atlanta.
King was also depressed. One day while in jail, a trustee snuck in the Birmingham newspaper for him. King read the front-page column which was written by eight prominent (and very moderate) Alabama clergymen- comprised of a priest, a rabbi, and six protestant ministers. These clergymen might be called in today’s parlance, “white allies.” They appealed for calmness and forbearance and accused King of violence.
After reading the column, he fell into a spiral of despair and a crisis of Spirit.
So, let’s pause a moment and consider that appeal, framed as it was in such reasonable language.
“Let’s just calm down now. I’m sure we can work something out.”
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Nobody likes conflict. We all want to get along, to resolve things. And that’s good.
But what happens when what appears to be “reasonableness” is just a way of masking obstruction, a way of sweeping under the rug valid complaints of injury and oppression, a way of discounting the felt experience of people who see no hope of remedy?
It’s a problem stated perhaps most famously in that ancient Hebrew scripture, the Book of Jeremiah, where the prophet complains, “I have given heed and listened, but they do not speak honestly; no one repents of wickedness, saying ‘What have I done?’ All of them turn to their own course like a horse plunging headlong into battle. . . . They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” (Jeremiah 8:5-6, 11)
TRUE THAT Jeremiah! There comes a point when we must pivot from the response that is reasonable to the one that the writer Cornell West calls, “radical,” a solution that goes to the root of the problem, that questions the most fundamental assumptions and argues for new ways of looking at the world, West argues that now nearly a half-century after King’s death we have lost sight of the radical edge of his work, of all the ways that his work questioned fundamental structures in American society and called us to larger lives.
We find the ground laid for that radical King in the “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” And who knows? But for that front-page appeal from his critics, King may not have had the occasion or impetus at that point in his life to gather his thoughts in that way. We know he was depressed from the lack of response to the protests, editorials from national newspapers criticizing his action, and President Kennedy’s resistance to requests to help him. He was also sad at being away from his wife, Coretta, two days after the birth of their daughter, Bernice.
Ultimately though, that column ignited a fire in King, and he began writing so feverishly that some of his supporters worried for his state of mind. Wyatt Walker, a close friend, and ally went to visit King four days after he was arrested. WALKER later reported being perplexed after his visit. He couldn’t understand why King was so angered by the column. He wondered to himself, “Why is he so upset at these white preachers? This is exactly what we expected of them. We’ve got to get protests going! Let’s start focusing on liberating blacks! Why is he worried about these guys?”
All alone, King began scribbling on the edge of the newspaper, then when all the empty edges of the newspaper were depleted, he moved on to using sheet after sheet of toilet paper. His writings were smuggled out of the jail by a friend, Clarence Jones, who stuffed the writing down the front of his pants. King’s toilet paper and newspaper writings were then passed on to his 17-year-old secretary, who did her best to decipher his handwriting. For all of King’s dreams, this Letter starts out in a cry of pain and anger.
It is here amid personal reflections on his family’s experience with racism and musing over passages of scripture that he lays down how he understands his calling to a radical activism, non-violent but centered in a love that refuses to see the separations that Birmingham’s laws enforce. You know the words: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he writes. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
He acknowledges that the purpose of his action is not to make peace but to stir things up: “To create such a crisis,” he says, “and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”
Those words may sound shocking, he says, but he makes no apologies: “There is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth,” he says, and “now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
King was released from jail on April 20th. Nothing much happened to the letter right away. It was released to the press and few newspapers were interested and it was pretty much ignored. Further, its addressed recipients never saw it until it was published months later. King’s friend, Wyatt Walker, was concerned at the lack of press attention that the Letter got, so he went to the American Friends Service Committee and they were the first organization to publish it at the end of May as a pamphlet. Christian Century published it June 12. And finally the New York Post published it.
Today, we aren’t recalling Dr. King’s life from cradle to grave, or to discuss him preaching about the meaning of his dream.
Today, I thought it was important to spend time really focusing on the story behind Dr. King’s now-famous letter. Let us not forget that the letter was written while King was in utter despair and was terrified for his life. He was able to hold on to the painful tension- of feeling his fury and anguish all the while refusing to create a movement. He found a constructive way to channel those feelings into this now famous letter. Let us not forget that parts of the letter had their humble origins on the edges of a smuggled newspaper and pieces of prison toilet paper. That only a small audience at first appreciated its importance. While it becomes a great document in retrospect, the circumstances of how it came into being were anything but!
On the day that King received the Nobel Prize, the head of the Nobel committee referred to this letter specifically. He channels King when he stated, “These are words delivered to mankind. These are words for global injustice. These are words that arise from a context but they are universal.”
Outside of the time and place in which he lived, his words stand the test of time. I hope you will take a few minutes tomorrow to read his Letter. To ask yourself how they might inspire you to take action. His words stand the test of time.
When Dr. King was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for participating in a civil rights demonstration, he laid out what was necessary for people to do to live in this new day and BE the new day: To reject the myth of time. I’ll give Dr. King the last words today: “It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills… We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men and women willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”
As we prepare for waiting worship, let’s ponder these queries together:
How have you allowed the myth of time- the “strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills” to impede you from action?
Have we spent much time contemplating something “radical,” i.e., a solution that goes to the root of the problem, that questions the most fundamental of our assumptions?
How are you personally inspired by Dr. King’s dogged commitment to the writing of this letter in the direst of circumstances? How can you take action?