Letter to Birmingham Letter to

Letter to Birmingham Letter to a Birmingham Jail: a Response to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reverend King Let me begin by saying how honored I felt to read your letter written from your cell in a Birmingham jail in response to certain critics of yours who found your actions "unwise and untimely." Your even tone and the sound logic of your arguments left little doubt as to the correctness of your conclusions in the face of such timidity and cowardice on the part of the white ministers who wrote to you.

Your words and ideas have a true power and the ability to affect people even from a printed page, and this is a gift that you have used consistently at great personal sacrifice to yourself and your family in the service of your race, and for this I thank you.

In your letter, you continually speak about the need to face reality, and to judge the current situation of the so-called Negro for what it is -- not what people believe it will be in time, or what it could be or should be, but simply for what it is.

You correctly identify the situation as one of ongoing, systematic, purposeful and calculated oppression that self-perpetuates by denying the so-called Negro the right to vote and access to the courts and other legal institutions, such that a man of color living in the South can more take part in electing his representatives in the halls of government than he can seek justice for abuses he receives to his person, the theft of his property, or even the murder of his family.

You are clearly able to see the situation for what it is. It is difficult for me to understand, then, why your insistence that the time to act is and always ahs been right now, whenever that now is, is not matched by an equal fervor in demanding a level of action that addresses the severity of the issue.

The immediacy of the situation is correctly met by an immediacy in your sense of action; you claim that it is no longer and truly has never been the proper time to let injustice live, and that direct action must be taken as time offers no guarantee that it will cure any ills. Yet the action you advocate is tame, and does not address the most pressing and immediate issues of the right to vote granted by amendments to the U.S.

Constitution nearly a century go, as called for by Du Bois who above all else demanded suffrage "now, henceforth and forever." This demand was made in 1906, and we still wait, and you would have us wait more.

We are still denied the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness upon which this country was founded, and you would have us peacefully sit at lunch counters and march in streets and wait to be arrested by the very system that has been doing so for, as you count it, 340 years. You carefully outline the four steps to your non-violent approach of ending segregation: determining the existence of injustice, attempting to negotiate, purifying and preparing individually and as a group, and finally engaging in peaceful direct action.

The case you make for these points is strong, and the evidence in Birmingham supporting this pattern of behavior on your part, and on the part of our enemies as well, is equally apparent. I do not understand, then, why you insist that the same methodologies that have proven ineffective in the past will somehow work with continued pressure.

Your insistence on this non-violent approach is no better than the constant cries of "Wait!" which you claim -- correctly -- echo so painfully in the ears of the so-called Negro men, women, and children who have yearned for freedom for centuries.

Another rising leader of the so-called Negro, Malcolm X, has insisted that "Truth will open our eyes and enable us to see the white wolf as he really is." Your letter touches on many of the points that reveal this truth, especially when you note that the white moderate is actually one of the most dangerous forces at work in the country today. Theirs is a race of oppression that will not ever remove their jaws from about our throats unless they are thrown away at knife point.

You have noted the refusal of the white race to grant us the freedoms, rights, and responsibilities that their own laws demanded be granted to us. Such behavior can only be considered evil and wolf-like. Evil and wolf-like creatures, again as you yourself note, are unlikely to change if they are not forced to. There is no force.