While The civil rights movement was led by Christians, it is easy to forget how many believers—particularly in the South—did not support the efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On this day set aside to honor this great leader we should read his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and reflect on how his words are applicable to us today.
boycott_movie
Because the movie came out on HBO and was about a boycott of public busses in the 1950s, it’s not hard to see why it slipped beneath most people’s radar. But the inherent drama of this true story is as exciting as anything you’re likely to see in the theaters this year. Watching it will make you wonder why we can’t seem to muster the same will to fight injustice today.
January 17th, 2011 | 9:44 am
Anybody else think the civil rights movement was horrendously misguided?
January 17th, 2011 | 10:44 am
Was the civil rights movement misguided?
I certainly disagree with that assessment, as do (I suspect) the vast majority of readers.
Thank God for MLK and the civil rights movement!
January 17th, 2011 | 11:01 am
I have always been impressed with MLK’s Natural Law analysis in the Letter From the Birmingham Jail. He does a fine job of analyzing the difference between just and unjust laws.
January 17th, 2011 | 12:20 pm
Look at the results rather than the ideology. One quick look at the results shows that average black income was 40% that of whites in the decades prior to the civil rights era. In those intervening decades, black income grew to 63% of white income.
Since civil rights, black income has grown to 64% of white income. The results are in: civil rights had almost no discernible effect on the quality of life of black Americans.
January 17th, 2011 | 1:32 pm
@Sean: Your conclusion is too sweeping. The confounding factors too many. I would rather say that the civil rights movement took a wrong turn sometime in the late 60s, early 70s. The 70s were called the Me decade. Indeed, declaring oneself a victim in need of specific redress became popular then and continues to this day.The early 60s and earlier sought something more fundamental and applicable to everyone. Have listen to MLK and compare that to current rhetoric.
January 17th, 2011 | 2:54 pm
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January 17th, 2011 | 3:07 pm
I disagree with the recommendation of “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. I do not want to criticize it as a piece of literature, given that it *was* written in a jail cell. But it is trite as a piece of moral reflection.
Its only value is its application of Thomas’ concept of natural law, but even that lacks depth or originality. For the rest, he simply explains in convoluted prose that the southern whites had two systems of law, one for themselves and one for blacks. True enough, but hardly the foundation of a comprehensive vision of the ethics of racial equality.
After several years of teaching it, I have removed it from my syllabus in a “Peace and Conflict” course.
January 17th, 2011 | 3:50 pm
I made no sweeping generalization. I said results matter more than intentions and gave an important example. It doesn’t matter whether the 70s were the Me Decade or not. That sort of rhetoric was there near the beginning of the civil rights movement anyway, but regardless, what matters is whether black people’s quality of life has improved since the civil rights era.
Clearly, civil rights didn’t address the black community’s internal problems, otherwise it would have had an impact.
January 17th, 2011 | 4:27 pm
I said my piece at home.
January 17th, 2011 | 6:17 pm
David . . .
I think you are misguided in your evaluation. King was not writing a treatise on natural law, nor was he penning a theological document, just as you, with your learning, were not trying to be philosophical or “deep” or original . . . but merely descriptive, in your posting above.
Convoluted prose? Dude, you either think way to highly of yourself, OR you think way, way too highly of yourself.
Contrary to your assertions, King wasn’t trying to proffer a comprehensive view of the ethics of racial equality, he was telling the chicken-squat pastors who ran for cover when he did not and who were criticizing him being in a jail cell, for not having the testicles to confront an obvious injustice.
I wonder what kind of literature you would pen (first on old newspaper, then scraps of paper, and finally a legal pad from your lawyer), after you got bounced into a jail in the 60′s south.
Imagine doing your class syllabus that way!
And, if you managed to produce something of substance, you would probably find your prose subject to criticism from some professor safely ensconced in his over-stuffed chair, puffing on his pipe and ruminating (see: “cud”) freely.
King’s letter/moral reflection?
You better duck, David! He has you nailed to the wall on context!
And that, is precisely the point you missed.
January 17th, 2011 | 6:57 pm
Off into cyberspace, I guess . . .
David . . . I disagree with you on several counts, but I will wait to see if the site retrieves my original post.
January 17th, 2011 | 7:49 pm
Hokay . . . lemme try this again . . .
David . . .
This will be in a bit different order than the original. which is probably pretending to be the Starship Enterprise orbiting way out yonder near the planet Uranus, picking off Klingons and such . . .
King’s “letter” was, first and foremost, a cri de coeur. One does not sit in a jail cell alone, being abandoned by critical and supposed friends and colleagues, writing on first, old newspaper, then scraps provided by a (Negro) jailer, and finally, on a legal pad from a lawyer, without crying out. I don’t know if you had that simple fact in your syllabus, but on an intellectual level, you should have had it.
King was not arguing Thomistic theology nor the concept of natural law; he was not using convoluted prose whatsoever, and he explained that possibility, if you remember your own syllabus. He didn’t pretend he was penning any “literature”–either for the moment or for the ages (although, despite your contention, he succeeded on both accounts!). The two systems of law were the given, not the fulcrum of his argument.
And, most certainly of all, he was not trying to persuade his fellow black pastors “of a comprehensive vision of the ethics of racial equality.”
He was chastising them for failing to follow through as pastors and as Christians. Billy Beck might wince, but agree–King held them to their supposed and professed beliefs, and they came up wanting–huge.
I am certain MLK did not worry about some dude professor 42 years hence, safely ensconced in his high-back chair, puffing his pipe or the lack thereof, speculating about what it was like to be in a flipping jail in Birmingham at that point in time.
In fact, I am certain that, as high as he went on the mountain and as great the vision he perceived . . . your opinion wasn’t even on the horizon . . . and that because he was speaking about nothing of which you are criticizing him.
Yet you call it trite, because otherwise, it is a pretty serious accusation against all who misunderstand it, and the moment. The call for moral reflection is not upon the dead man, but upon you for calling it forth. Pardon me, in all sincerity, for finding you wanting at every level.
How old are you. David? Very serious question.
Were you even born then?
January 17th, 2011 | 8:01 pm
Now I am waiting for the second attemtp to show up.
David, my response is on my site.
If you are serious in what you wrote, I would be happy to engage you in discussion.
January 17th, 2011 | 8:08 pm
[...] First Things is losing posts left and right–two off into space . . . but I kept this one. [...]
January 17th, 2011 | 10:54 pm
Man o man . . . both showed up. Hate it when that happens. LOL
Is okay. :-)
January 18th, 2011 | 7:34 am
“How old are you. David? Very serious question.
Were you even born then?”
Uh huh.
January 18th, 2011 | 9:32 am
@Sean: The problem is not the results but your interpretation of them. The civil rights movement has fallen short as those in the movement will readily tell you. Your claim however was “the civil rights movement was horrendously misguided”. There are plenty of other contributing explanations, e.g. the sexual revolution’s effect on those with lower income. That means you need to back up your assertion with more detail. To start with, I’ll take “horrendously” as empty hyperbole. So, was it misguided at all times? By all of its leaders? Was the misguidance specific to the civil rights movement? How was it misguided? Did any of it help? Are there other explanations with greater force? There are too many questions unanswered to reach your conclusion.
My own starting point is the turn from human entitlement to victim entitlement in the movement. That said, the sixties saw the end of de jure segregation. I’m from L.A. where segregation was always de facto. It still is, though the boundaries are far fuzzier and locations shift. South Central L.A., aka Watts, is now mainly Latino. As a seaman, I was stationed in Pensacola in 1968. At the airport I saw my first bathroom labeled “Colored”. It was a shock. Since then, I was stationed in Charleston, SC, from 1979-84. One theater still played “Birth of A Nation” continuously downtown but there was no evidence of legally enforced segregation. Ten years later, that is a success, if limited.
January 18th, 2011 | 11:09 am
I certainly had not intended to take this snow/ice day as a day to argue about MLK’s legacy. Furthermore, I agree that the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (hereafter, “Letter”) needs to be read in the context of its origin, both historically and psychologically. Certainly it is an essential text for anyone studying, say, the history of the 1960s, or of race relations in America.
But I took (perhaps incorrectly) Mr. Carter’s recommendation to mean that “Letter” was morally/ethically/spiritually significant in its own right, a “canonical” text that embodied certain essential beliefs of continuing significance. It was to that assumed signification that I demurred.
A brief outline of “Letter” follows, with my comments in brackets. Let’s use this text, http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/Letter_Birmingham_Jail.pdf , so that we’re all reading the same pagination.
1. (p. 1) He defends going to Birmingham. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” [This argument is ad hoc. When a person wants to get involved opposing a perceived injustice against someone else, he will make the argument. When he doesn't, he won't--e.g., those people who said we were not responsible for removing Saddam Hussein. I simply don't see a morally coherent argument for knowing when I am responsible for injustice being done to a third party, and when I am not.]
2. (pp. 1-2) He wonders about the objections to his actions, given that no one has acted against the injustices that elicited his “nonviolent campaign. [Fair enough.]
3. (p. 2) He explains he is trying to create “tension,” so that the oppressor can see the injustice of his action. He invokes Socrates, who “felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal.” [This confuses Socrates and Plato, and imports a modern conceptuality of "objectivity" that Socrates didn't possess.] He justifies the discomfort he is causing, pointing out that “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor.” [True, but hardly profound.] Bottom of p. 2 is a long, heart-felt description of the indignities inflicted on the “Negro”.
4. (p. 3) He addresses the question why he supports some laws, but is willing to break others. He answers using Thomas Aquinas: “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.” [OK] ” Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” [I don't see anything direct in Thomas' analysis of natural law (based on the three "orders of natural inclination,": preservation of being, procreation, and human goodness/truth) that would support that claim, and he gives no argument for it. What, morally speaking, is the "human personality"? What is a "degradation" of human personality?] He attacks segregation using an exposition of Buber (I-thou) and Tillich (sin as estrangement). Since estrangement is sin, and segregation is estrangement, segregation is sin. [Not very convincing in my mind.]
5. (p. 3) He then points out the “[white] majority inflicts [a law] on a [Negro] minority that is not binding on itself.” So the majority themselves do not live by the laws that they invoke to keep “Negroes” oppressed.
6. (p. 4) He defends the rise of the method of non-violence in the “Negro church,” explaining that otherwise ” by now many streets of the South would be flowing with floods of blood;” returns to the theme of the “many pent-up resentments” of “the Negro,” and responds to the suggestions that he is being an extremist by invoking Jesus, Amos, Paul, and then Lincoln and Jefferson, as extremists. [The list suggests an interesting "civil religion," that sees Lincoln and Jefferson as being canonical figures alongside Jesus, et.al.]
7. (p. 5) He expresses his disappointment with the white church, in its unwillingness to see the integration struggle as a moral, and not merely political one.
This is a “period piece”, worth reading for its historical significance and impact. But I see nothing that addresses or clarifies deep moral issues about human relationships between different ethic/”racial” groups. Like no. 1 above, the entire argument is ad hoc: it is formulated to meet the needs of the hour. NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT, but a moral/spiritual classic it does not make. The theology is a patische of seminary learning: a slice of Aquinas, a pat of Buber and Tillich, a dash of an allusion to Schleiermacher (the “unique God-consciousness” of Jesus, bottom p. 3).
January 18th, 2011 | 12:31 pm
Mike,
The sexual revolution played a big part in it, as did the widespread use of drugs in the 70s. But the social pathologies that afflict the black community today (single motherhood, violence, obnoxious behavior in public, indifference to education) were overly prevalent in it well before the civil rights movement, as a result of blacks adopting the mores of poor southern whites, who have always exhibited the same problems. In fact, the same terms used to describe black problems today and in the 19th century were commonly used to describe southern whites as well. It’s a little known fact that the same northern establishments that discriminated against blacks also discriminated against southern whites, because both groups had well earned reputations for obnoxious behavior.
Northern blacks (at least those who lived in the north prior to southern blacks’ migrating north), otoh, having adopted northern white mores, historically never had the same pathologies that southern blacks have. Northern restaurants went back and forth in discriminating against blacks over generational periods, at first not discriminating against them in the early to mid parts of the 19th century, and then discriminating against them as southern blacks moved north.
Civil rights was never going to address those issues. All civil rights did was say, “We’re sorry, we should never have expected you to assimilate to the social mores required for a functioning democracy. We will change our ways and try to force middle and lower class whites to accept your behavioral problems.”
That’s all civil rights accomplished.
January 18th, 2011 | 2:42 pm
David–
Not wishing to invoke the old saw about “assume” . . .
1) You cite “Canonical” and then applied as the force of your reasoning.
I simply don’t see a morally coherent argument for knowing when I am responsible for injustice being done to a third party, and when I am not.
Can’t help you with that one. But to argue that King’s justification was ad hoc is to completely ignore who he was and what he did. Leaving the race-baiter Jesse Jackson aside, the SCLC has amply proven since King’s death that they didn’t really understand him at all. King was arguing away from race as the motivating force, they have argued for it ever since his death. King knew better and wrote of what he knew–and did what he knew had to be done. He did what no one before or since has done. He had the prescience to know he would most likely die for doing so, but he took on no Messianic tones. He did what his conscience dictated, and it was right. To in any way disparage a man who does so, is to disparage oneself.
2) ok
3) The primary “discomfort” he caused was to himself, and then to the blatant racial attitudes. I am no bleeding heart liberal to be sure, but King transcended the juvenile politics that, then and now, plague us all. He took a universal–that men are born to be free–and used whatever means, from a Christian and non-violent perspective, that were afforded him. If he confused Socratic principles with Platonic principles, how, in the end, does that really matter? Before GPS I often took the wrong roads to get to my destination, but I got there in the end. Whether or not he was “profound” . . . well that is up to whomever reads what he wrote. To many, he was introducing a pattern of thought that was not present or efficacious in the minds of most. If that is not “profound” . . . it is surely sneaking up on the idea.
The indignities visited upon the “Negro” often included violent death or physical harm. I don’t need Aquinas on that one, I’ll go to the source–Christ–and on that count alone grant King a good measure of profundity.
4) I would counter (from the “West”) Imago Dei, and Theosis (from the “East”). Segregation would prevent either/both, and nullify Matthew 28:19-20.
5) Point?
6) Back to the “canonical” bit, with a dash of “civil religion.” Rather, might not one legitimately see him referring to a confluence? I see that as far more likely, given the entire context of what he was doing. I give him additional credit, despite his many temptations and failures, for not allowing himself to take on a Messianic aura. He was a black man who was telling America that what they were doing was emphatically and empirically wrong. It was, and the messenger was shot anyway.
7) The “white church” rightly deserved that shot, and in some ways, still does. Whatever I say to that will be taken as anecdotal, but 25 years of school and active ministry gives me a leg up saying so.
David–King was not trying to “bake a cake” as your conclusion somewhat implies. And King did not set out to write a literary masterpiece or any kind of a “classic.”
If you’ll pardon the scatolgical reference, he was simply, and as eloquently as a black man sitting in a southern jail could do writing in the borders of newspaper, scraps of paper, and eventually a legal pad from his lawyer, that we as a nation and people had been “stepping in it” for a long time, and it was now time to identify what “it” was we were stepping in, and stop doing so.
And to the extent that, despite all, he managed in life and in his murder and death, to shove an entire nation in another direction, to re-think patterns of thought that were predicated upon segregation, and its underlying cause–hatred–also addressed by Jesus first, then I would call it anything BUT trite.
I would suggest that you keep it in your syllabus, if for no other reason than you might find it offers others the inspiration you do not see. That, I motion, would be a fairly objective action to take, all in all.
January 18th, 2011 | 2:48 pm
Sean, therapists are trained to be alert for the words “always” and “never” – and unsupportable hyperbole; I find applying this to discussion has been very helpful over the years. You use them a fair bit. It denotes a person willing to make a sweeping claim even in the face of contradictory evidence, and as such, a person unwilling to discuss but only to advocate. You raise an interesting discussion, but apparently we can’t have that discussion with you. More measured language is not a mere rewording, but a self-instruction.
I agree with Mr. Layman – King’s letter is better understood as preaching – the reminding of the congregation what they already know, infused with inspiring language – than teaching, a new idea or application only half understood, explained to the congregation. It belongs to a moment in time and is an historic document, attempting to bring to bear the full moral force of Western Civilization on a particular situation. It doesn’t necessarily generalise well.
I have often wondered if those he accused were indeed as he described them. Bigots or cowards might indeed hide behind the idea “Yes, but it’s not the right time,” but that position might also be taken honestly. MLK decided that the time was ripe and put himself at risk betting that his reading of the times was correct. That is certainly courageous and perceptive, but is not evidence that such actions are always God-inspired. A lot of sincere people have made that bet over the centuries and lost. Worse, those who are leaders are also betting with the lives of others. “Letter,” had it been written say, fifteen years earlier, might have indeed caused blood to run in the streets, with innocents suffering to no purpose.
Pain and suffering count heavily in the tabulating of justice. The feeling “I’ve had enough,” while it might inspire one to action and thus have good effect, is not itself morally weighty.
January 18th, 2011 | 8:08 pm
AVI,
Thank you for the input, you are always insightful and never inaccurate.
January 20th, 2011 | 9:55 am
Sean, that was either remarkable humility or deft mockery, and either way, my hat’s off to you.
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