letter to birmingham

Marcella Patton
November 25, 2013
Soc.9a.m
“Letter From Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr.

King spent eight days in his cell. During that time he composed his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." The letter was ostensibly conceived in response to a letter that had recently run in a local newspaper, which had claimed that the protests were "unwise and untimely"; however, King also quite deliberately wrote his letter for a national audience. The letter reveals King's strength as a rhetorician and his breadth of learning. It alludes to numerous secular thinkers, as well as to the Bible. It is passionate and controlled, and was subsequently appropriated by many writing textbooks as a model of persuasive writing. At the time, it gave a singular, eloquent voice to a massive, jumbled movement.
Once King was released from jail, the protests assumed a larger scale and a more confrontational character. At the suggestion of SCLC member Jim Bevel, the organizers began to recruit younger protestors. They visited high schools, training youth in nonviolent tactics. The method was dangerous–kids could get hurt–but also potentially very symbolically powerful: children were the beneficiaries of the movement; they represented the movement's hope for the future. As had happened in Montgomery, violence followed the concessions. Whites bombed black homes and churches, and blacks retaliated with mob violence. King's activities in Birmingham, therefore, included a final stage, during which he patrolled the city, speaking wherever people had gathered; he implored African Americans to answer violence only with peace.
The Black Panthers were members of the Black Panther Party, a militant black political organization founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland, California in 1966. Stokely Carmichael was also closely involved in the group's development. The P arty called for black self-defense and demanded equality for blacks in political, economic, and social arenas nation-wide. In their militancy, the Black Panthers differed with King and his non-violent direct action tactics. At a march in 1966 the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Stokely Carmichael, used this slogan before a national audience, putting it into currency as a widely used term. "Black Power" came to denote a brand of civil rights activism more militant than that of King, and King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference refused to use or endorse the slogan for fear of alienating white sympathy.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination in employment and in public facilities, and gave the federal government greater power to enforce the desegregation of schools. Yet this Act could only pass in the right atmosphere, and the creation of such an atmosphere is generally attributed to one pivotal series of events and their repercussions: the civil rights protests in Birmingham in 1963, and the response of many white Americans to the white-on- black violence they provoked. The mayor was a segregationist and the police commissioner, Eugene "Bull" Conner was known for his hostile and sometimes violent treatment of blacks. The Governor of the state was George Wallace, who had won office with promises of "segregation forever. “In Birmingham between 1957 and 1962 seventeen black churches and homes had been bombed, including the home of shuttles worth, which campaigned actively for civil rights. Although the population of Birmingham was 40% African American, there seemed little hope for a political solution to the racial divide: of 80,000 registered voters, only 10,000 were black.
Congress of Racial Equality was the first organization in the Civil Rights Movement systematically to employ non-violent direct action, the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, was founded in Chicago in 1942. In the 1960s, it participated in activism in the South, providing support and supervisions to sit-ins and voter-registration campaigns, often cooperating with King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference he campaign began on 3 April with lunch-counter sit-ins. On 6 April, protestors marched on City Hall, and forty-two people were arrested. Demonstrations occurred each day thereafter. While the jails filled with peaceful blacks, King negotiated with white businessmen, whose stores were losing business due to the protests. Disturbed by the unprecedented silence from her husband, Coretta Scott King called the White House. Her call was returned by Robert Kennedy and then by the President himself. The Kennedy Administration sent FBI agents to Birmingham, and King promptly received more hospitable treatment. Moreover, this intervention by Kennedy gave the movement greater momentum.
Following the initial circulation of King’s letter in Birmingham as a mimeographed copy, it was published in a variety of formats: as a pamphlet distributed by the American Friends Service Committee and as an article in periodicals such as Christian Century, Christianity and Crisis, the New York Post, and Ebony magazine. The first half of the letter was introduced into testimony before Congress by Representative William Fitts Ryan (D-NY) and published in the Congressional Record. One year later, King revised the letter and presented it as a chapter in his 1964 memoir of the Birmingham Campaign, Why We Can’t Wait, a book modeled after the basic themes set out in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
The body of King’s letter called into question the clergy’s charge of “impatience” on the part of the African American community and of the “extreme” level of the campaign’s actions (“White Clergymen Urge”). “For years now, I have heard the word ‘Wait!” King wrote. “This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never’” (King, Why, 83). He articulated the resentment felt “when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’— then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait”