injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere essay 150

“Injustice Anywhere Is a Threat to Justice Everywhere”

Martin luther king jr. and “letter from a birmingham jail”.

by Nicole Hammons

After the Supreme Court of the United States ruled against segregation in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education,  segregationists became more organized, vocal, and extreme. In response, African-American communities formed their own plan of action. Events like the lynching of Emmett Till and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, both in 1955, brought tensions between white supremacists and Civil Rights activists to a dangerous head. The situation worsened due to the brutality of the Birmingham police force, led by the infamous “Bull” Conner. 1

In 1963, pacifist activists led by the young Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. created a document called the Birmingham Manifesto which invoked both Christian and American mandates for justice.  2  In accordance with this Manifesto, King and his supporters staged several non-violent protests. During one of these protests, King was arrested for violating a state injunction barring such demonstrations. While confined to his cell in the Birmingham jail, King responded to media critics and the white clergymen in the Birmingham community. These critics published an open letter in the Birmingham News denouncing the “unwise and untimely” actions of the protesters and their “outsider” leaders. 3  King responded to these and other detractors in the form of a letter, which was published upon his release. In this letter, King beautifully and concisely explained the philosophy of civil disobedience. King’s 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” promoted non-violent civil disobedience and urgency in Civil Rights advancement. It was distributed throughout the United States in newspaper and magazine reprints. It reached far beyond the many disenfranchised readers of the time; King’s words are still used to guide and defend non-violent protesters today. Although King minced no words on people unfriendly to the Movement, King was careful not to label any person or group as an enemy. Instead, he pled for a ‘change of heart’ by white moderates, white clergy, and black advocates of violence or who passively allow racial oppression to occur.

Perhaps surprisingly, he did not rail against segregationists; his letter speaks only to those whose minds he thought he could change. The success of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” can be largely attributed to King’s directness and honesty. Instead of tarring all his critics with the same brush, he identified each of them, and explained what he believed to be their rationale for disagreement. He addressed individual criticisms and then turned those words against the critics—instructing them to pay more attention to resolving the situation that precipitated the protests and not on the protests themselves. 4  In the “Letter,” King expressed the frustration towards apathetic white moderates. He believed that these men and women could quickly and easily help the civil rights activists achieve their goals. Many moderates sympathized with and shared the ideals of the civil rights movement, but discouraged protests and demonstrations in the name of keeping peace. Speaking to this group, King stressed the importance of justice. He delineates the difference between “a negative peace, which is the absence of tension, [and] a positive peace, which is the presence of justice.” 5  His method of non-violent protests, he claimed, was the swiftest and most rational route to a just peace. The white religious leaders of the South disappointed King even more disappointing than white moderates. Some, but not all, advised their congregations to accept and obey the decision handed down in Brown v. Board of Education . Very few preached a message of toleration and acceptance. For King, this was reprehensible. In his mind, the message preached at every pulpit should have been “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.”  6

In current scholarship, King is hailed as a peacemaker; this was not the dominant representation of King in 1960s Birmingham. Even though his actions and words were explicitly non-violent, many regarded him as an extremist. King turned the negative epithet of “extremist” on its head, asking his reader to consider historical “extremists” like Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ. Looking at injustice in Birmingham and the world beyond, King states that the time has again come for such “creative extreme[ism].” 7  Although he self-identified as an extremist in the name of love and justice, King was quick to disassociate himself from what he saw as undesirable extremes in his community. He lamented the extreme complacency of many in the African-American community. By their apathy and acceptance, these worn-down souls became de facto segregationists themselves. At the other extreme were those who were so angered by segregation and injustice that their anger turned to violence. King calls this force one of “bitterness and hatred.” 8  These angry groups directly oppose King’s philosophy; they put forth a deliberately anti-American and anti-Christian message of violent opposition. 9 King’s doctrine of nonviolence concisely laid out the four principal steps of any nonviolent campaign: “collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action.” 10  It was King’s belief that the community in Birmingham had already gone through the first three steps and was therefore completely justified in executing these nonviolent direct action protests. 11  Nonviolent campaigns are more than just a way to gain publicity for a cause. When negotiations have failed, or are not an option, nonviolent direct action creates a public tension that can force negotiations or acquiescence from the relevant authority. Contrary to his critics, King did not believe that this tension was dangerous or even negative. Rather, he saw it as a helpful and productive alternative to the tension created by a violent reaction to the same injustice. King was carefully to ensure that these demonstrations stayed peaceful; screening and teaching volunteers before protests began.

King directly responds to many who condemned nonviolent means on the grounds that they often cause violence. He used the famous analogy of blaming a robbed man for the robbery, on the grounds of his wealth. His point was this: violence is not inevitable nor unavoidable, and it is certainly not the only outcome of nonviolence. Indeed, nonviolent protests like those in Birmingham were proof that there are peaceful means to attract attention and effect political change. Politically, the most important part of this letter was King’s discourse on injustice. In this single short letter, King redefined ideals of justice and injustice, and how justice related to the law. To King, injustice was not confined to an individual person or place. Although he lived and worked in Atlanta, King viewed the suffering and injustice in Birmingham as his own. In his own words, “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” 12  The last sentence is one of the most famous and enduring of the entire letter. In this discourse on justice, King eloquently described the differences and tensions between what is legal and what is right. Integration and equality, he said, are both “constitutional and God given rights.” 13  In his reading, these rights are separate and distinct. Constitutional rights are bestowed by right of being a citizen of a certain nation, bound by a legal constitution. God-given rights, in King’s eyes, were equally distributed amongst all people, and should not be denied to any group by any other group. Although he expressed the highest respect for the law, King also made it clear that laws are not always just; just and unjust laws can be distinguished by several features:

 “A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.”  14

Beyond these philosophical differences between just and unjust laws, there were political differences. A unjust law is forced on a minority by a majority who refuses to follow the law itself. For a law to be just, it must apply and be obeyed by majorities and minorities alike. King went beyond discussing and defining justice and injustice; he provided a manual for change. He advocated a path of civil disobedience, but not of reckless law-breaking; according to King, individuals should only break a law if it is truly unjust, and if one’s conscience will not permit obeying it. If someone chose to break a law, he or she must graciously accept whatever penalty or punishment administered by the authorities. The purpose of this type of nonviolent protest was to alert and inspire one’s community to take action. Although he advocated peace, King was not preaching a message of patience. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is pervaded by a sense of urgency that is especially powerful when contrasted against his message of nonviolence. He stated that he, and all who are discriminated against, cannot and should not have to wait for justice – the wait for justice was a great injustice in and of itself. He called upon his followers and admirers to demand their rights, for they would not be willingly given by their oppressors. 15  “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is a popular classic among students of language and rhetoric, as well as students of history. It occupies a very unique place on the spectrum of written documents; it is both a private and open letter, a defense and a proclamation, a sermon and manifesto. King masterfully combined the emotion of traditional Negro sermons while maintaining the logic structure of the political world. 16 Famed for his speeches, most notably the “I Have a Dream” speech given at the 1963 March on Washington, King does not lose any of his persuasive power in the written form. He deliberately used rhetorical devices like parallelism, repetition, and theme to make his audience feel, as well as understand, his message. 17   For the full text of the letter, follow this link .

Teachers: The “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” has been adopted by the Common Core curriculum as a crucial document in American history for students to understand, along with the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. To watch a class analyze the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” watch the video below.

For more information: Visit the U.S. History Scene reading list for The Long Civil Rights Movement

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Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter From Birmingham Jail’

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.”

Images above: King is ready for a mug shot ( left ) in Montgomery, Alabama, after his 1956 arrest while protesting the segregation of the city's buses. His leadership of the successful 381-day bus boycott brought him to national attention. Right: In 1967, King serves out the sentence from his arrest four years earlier in Birmingham, Alabama.

In April 1963, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, after he defied a state court’s injunction and led a march of black protesters without a permit, urging an Easter boycott of white-owned stores. A statement published in The Birmingham News , written by eight moderate white clergymen, criticized the march and other demonstrations.

This prompted King to write a lengthy response, begun in the margins of the newspaper. He smuggled it out with the help of his lawyer, and the nearly 7,000 words were transcribed. The eloquent call for “constructive, nonviolent tension” to force an end to unjust laws became a landmark document of the civil-rights movement. The letter was printed in part or in full by several publications, including the New York Post , Liberation magazine, The New Leader , and The Christian Century .

The Atlantic published it in the August 1963 issue, under the headline “The Negro Is Your Brother.”

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century b.c. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. 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.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants—for example, to remove the stores’ humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.

As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by—product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that the March election [for Birmingham’s mayor] was ahead, and so we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that Mr. Connor [the commissioner of public safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor] was in the runoff, we decided again to postpone action so that the demonstration could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct-action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates 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, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

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One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I–it” relationship for an “I–thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state’s segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. 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 evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. 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” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, 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 all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.

I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self-respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do-nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.

If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble-rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies—a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist , and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on Freedom Rides—and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, 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.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” 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? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime—the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some—such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Anne Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle—have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach-infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as “dirty nigger-lovers.” Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful “action” antidotes to combat the disease of segregation.

Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious—education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful—in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.” But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent—and often even vocal—sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment.

I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation—and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather “nonviolently” in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of non-violence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, Martin Luther King Jr.

This article appears in the special MLK issue print edition with the headline “Letter From Birmingham Jail” and was published in the August 1963 Atlantic as “The Negro Is Your Brother.“ © 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., © renewed 1991 Coretta Scott King. All works by Martin Luther King Jr. have been reprinted by arrangement with the Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., care of Writers House as agent for the proprietor, New York, New York.

Martin Luther King, Jr. on Justice and the Four Steps to Successful Nonviolent Resistance

By maria popova.

On the day of Dr. King’s arrest, eight male Alabama clergymen issued a public statement directed at him, titled “The Call for Unity,” following a letter penned a few months earlier under the title “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense.” They accused him of being an “outsider” to the community’s cause, suggested that racial injustice in Alabama shouldn’t be his business, and claimed that the nonviolent resistance demonstrations he led were “unwise and untimely.” “We further strongly urge our own Negro community to withdraw support from these demonstrations,” they wrote. It was such a blatant example of the very injustice Dr. King had dedicated his life to eradicating — the hijacking of what should be “common sense” to all in the service of what is “common” and convenient to only those in power — that he felt compelled to respond. The following day, while still in jail, he penned a remarkable book-length open letter. ( “Never before have I written a letter this long,” he marveled as he penned the final paragraphs.)

Aware of the media’s power to incite the popular imagination, King and his team began distributing mimeographed copies to the clergy of Birmingham and eventually made their way to the press. Major newspapers and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Post , published excerpts. The full text was eventually published as Letter from Birmingham City Jail ( public library ) and became not only a foundational text of the American civil rights movement in the 1960s but an enduring manifesto for social justice and the human struggle for equality in every sense of the word, in every corner of the world.

Drawing on his vast pool of intellectual resources — from Socrates to St. Augustine to Thoreau — and his own singular gift for blending the powers of a philosopher, a preacher, and a poet, Dr. King debunks the clergymen’s arguments one by one, beginning with their assertion that the injustice in Birmingham is not his “outsider” business:

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.

He outlines the four pillars of nonviolent resistance — which bear a poignant parallel to the four rules for arguing intelligently that philosopher Daniel Dennett would formulate more than half a century later — and writes:

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: 1) collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive; 2) negotiation; 3) self-purification; and 4) direct action.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Bertrand Russell’s timeless wisdom on the constructive and destructive elements in human nature — “Construction and destruction alike satisfy the will to power,” he wrote in 1926, “but construction is more difficult as a rule, and therefore gives more satisfaction to the person who can achieve it.” — King puts forth the wonderful notion of “creative tension” as a force of constructive action:

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue… There is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt 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, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

King’s ideas undoubtedly influenced South African writer, freedom-fighter, and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer when, a decade later, she contemplated the role of the writer as precisely such a gadfly on the back of injustice — something King further illuminates when he adds:

We who engage in non-violent 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 as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing create, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

He considers why such nonviolent instigation of “creative tension” is vital to the claiming of freedom:

History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and give up their unjust posture; but … groups are more immoral than individuals. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

He zooms in on the accusation of untimeliness and, arguing that “justice too long delayed is justice denied,” and puts in poignant perspective the relativity of timeliness:

I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; … when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Fun-town is closed to colored children, and see depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; … when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” — then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair.

Indeed, he argues that at the root of the clergymen’s accusations is a profound misconception of time. Time, as we know, is a human invention that Galileo perfected ; like all technology, it is a neutral tool that can be bent to wills good and evil, put toward ends constructive and destructive — something King captures beautifully:

All this … grows out of a tragic misconception of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy, and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift out national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

He goes on to explore the expatiation of the legal system for the unjust ends of those in power:

There are two types of laws: There are just and unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” … An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong… […] An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority group that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.

In a sense, contemporary popular culture is built on the same foundation as unjust law — on the warping of sameness and difference, which Shonda Rhimes addressed with extraordinary elegance of insight in her Human Rights Campaign award acceptance speech . To King, indeed, the law should be reclaimed as an ally to the populace in its diverse totality rather than a formalized system of objectifying people. He sees nonviolent resistance not as a way to destroy the law but as a way to normalize it:

In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law… That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do it 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 willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law.

But the law, of course, cannot and should not be separate from the social forces that support it. In one of his most poignant remarks in the letter, which resonates all the more deeply in our present culture where impenitent reaction has replaced considered response and become the seedbed of misunderstanding, King adds:

Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Letter from Birmingham City Jail remains an indispensable read for any thinking, feeling member of the human family. Complement it with Einstein’s little-known correspondence with W.E.B. Du Bois on race and racial justice and Margaret Mead on the root of racism and how to counter it .

Thank you, Jacqueline

— Published March 18, 2015 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/03/18/martin-luther-king-letter-from-birmingham-city-jail/ —

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'Letter From Birmingham Jail' 50 Years Later

Tuesday marks the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Letter From Birmingham Jail , one of the most iconic documents of the civil rights movement. Host Michel Martin explores the letter's historical significance, and what it means 50 years later.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s letter from Birmingham jail. Dr. King penned this letter as a response to white clergymen who called his campaign of non-violent protests, quote, "unwise and untimely," unquote, and had urged him not to intervene in Alabama's segregationist policies.

Here is a clip of Dr. King reading part of the letter that he wrote in response.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: I can not sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

MARTIN: The full text of that letter was published in a number of news outlets, including the New York Post Sunday magazine and The Atlantic Monthly. It was controversial at the time, but it's now recognized as an iconic statement of the principles underlying the civil rights movement.

We thought this was a good time to take a closer look at that letter, so we've called upon, once again, Clayborne Carson. He is the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. He's a professor of history at Stanford University and he's with us once again.

Thank you so much for joining us once again.

CLAYBORNE CARSON: Good to talk to you.

MARTIN: There are a number of lines from this letter that I think people instantly recognize. I mean they're like Shakespeare in the sense that people have heard them. They don't necessarily remember where they heard them, but they've heard them. One of those lines, of course, is: Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Are there other statements from the letter that you think have really become part of our shared history?

CARSON: Oh, there are so many. I think that what has happened is that the letter has become part of the national consciousness - just like the "I Have a Dream," speech, which he gave several months later - and the notion of the interconnectedness of humanity, the way in which we are all responsible for correcting injustices wherever they occur in the world because they ultimately affect us.

MARTIN: Is there another line from the letter that you particularly love?

CARSON: Well, he kind of paraphrases Frederick Douglass when he talks about justice is never given voluntarily by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed. You know, that idea is something that I think we often forget today, that a person in a position of privilege is not likely to give something voluntarily. The whole purpose of nonviolence is to create a situation of unrest that upsets the status quo and requires those in power to respond to the demands of those who are oppressed.

I was reminded of that during the Occupy protests, that sometimes you need to upset those in power. You need to demand justice, that injustice is not necessarily recognized by everyone, especially if it's familiar, especially if it's become a habit or a custom. And that's what happened in the segregated South, is that most people who were white Southerners did not recognize the injustice of the system until people began to demand change.

MARTIN: And, as we mentioned, King wrote this in response to eight white clergymen who'd criticized his presence in Birmingham, remember that, at this point, he was based in Atlanta, and that he had been invited to Birmingham. And he was responding to their public criticisms of him. Could you talk a little bit more about who they were, and what fault they found with his being in Birmingham?

CARSON: Yes. Well, these were people who considered themselves Southern moderates. They expressed that they were sympathetic toward the goals of the movement, but they simply challenged King about bringing disorder and protest to Birmingham.

Martin Luther King was disappointed that faith leaders - who should be his natural allies in this struggle for social justice - were standing on the sidelines doing nothing. And I think that that motivated him in his criticism, and perhaps led him to develop an argument that I think, later on, many of these faith leaders would recognize was the right argument. And he said that, you know, the greatest enemies are not the people who are - know that they are doing wrong, but the ones who stand by and let wrong go on without standing up to it.

MARTIN: We mentioned that it was published in a number of news outlets, and it is quite lengthy, which is, you know - maybe it's more of a reflection of our own times, that such a long letter might not find a home in today's, you know, media in its entirety.

But do you - can you tell us, what was the reaction at the time? I'm particularly interested in the reaction of the people to whom it was directly sent, and also, more broadly, what the reaction was.

CARSON: At the time, most of the people did not recognize the importance of it, similar to the "I Have a Dream" speech. I saw the newspaper accounts the day after, and no one really recognized that a great speech had been delivered. But I think that it was only over time that these eight white Birmingham ministers recognized that they were on the wrong side of history, and it became a source of embarrassment.

King understood, in the long view, that he was on the right side of history, and that, ultimately, that letter would have an impact, and it did. It took a while. I was at the march on Washington, and I didn't know, even in that audience, that I was listening to a great speech that would be remembered 50 years later. And I'm sure that some of the people who first saw his letter - which was written on yellow pads, and it was just kind of all pieced together from these notes that Martin Luther King made - I don't know if any of them really recognized that this would be a letter that would be in textbooks and books of literature 50 years later. People at the time did not understand the central importance of what was going on in Birmingham.

King was in the middle of a campaign that, if he had failed in Birmingham, there wouldn't have been the "I Have a Dream" speech, because he wouldn't have been invited to give the concluding speech if he had just failed in a major campaign in Birmingham. There wouldn't have been the Man of the Year acknowledgement in Time magazine. There wouldn't have been the Nobel Peace Prize the following year.

So I think that, when we go back, we have to understand that Birmingham was a crucial campaign for King. He had to win in Birmingham, and the letter was motivated by his understanding of how decisive that campaign was.

MARTIN: He was a very prolific writer and speaker, you know, obviously, but most people who write a lot have varying opinions about their own work. Sometimes they're critical of things that they've written and think, oh, I really could have done a better job with that. Do you happen to know how he felt about this letter? Was he proud of it?

CARSON: Yes. I think he was. I think he understood that, under the duress of being in jail, he actually wrote the best and most cogent statement that he would ever write in his life. He didn't have access to his library. He didn't have access to the input of the people around him, but in that jail cell, he had the power of concentration and memory that allowed him to express more clearly and more cogently than he would ever express again the principles of nonviolent civil resistance.

So I think that, in that way, he kind of welcomed the opportunity that being in jail gave him and the opportunity that his white critics gave him to understand how to argue persuasively for the forces of justice that he represented in the movement.

MARTIN: Clayborne Carson is the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. He's also a professor of history at Stanford University, and he was kind enough to join us from the studios at that campus.

Professor Carson, thank you so much for speaking with us.

CARSON: Thank you so much.

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Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963

To what extent did Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice become a reality for African Americans during the civil rights movement?

• I can interpret primary sources related to Founding principles of liberty, equality, and justice in the civil rights movement.
• I can explain how laws and policy, courts, and individuals and groups contributed to or pushed back against the quest for liberty, equality, and justice for African Americans.
• I can create an argument using evidence from primary sources.
• I can analyze issues in history to help find solutions to present-day challenges.

Essential Vocabulary

Building context.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was the most famous civil rights activist of the 1960s. He called for nonviolent means, including sit-ins, boycotts, and marches, to end segregation in the South. In the early 1960s, Birmingham, Alabama, was one of the most segregated cities in the United States. King traveled there in 1963 to fight against racial discrimination and was arrested. After his arrest, a group of white religious leaders wrote him a letter criticizing the means and timing of his fight for greater equality. The civil rights leader penned a response while in a jail cell and then rewrote it for publication when he was freed.

Source: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:   While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” . . . Since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms . . .   I am in Birmingham because injustice is here . . . I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny . . .   You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” . . . Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored . . .   You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”   Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an “I – it” relationship for the “I – thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn’t segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.   Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal . . . I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist [an activist whose goal was to integrate Blacks into white society] or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother . . .

Comprehension and Analysis Questions

• To whom was this letter written?
• According to this letter, for what reason did King come to Birmingham?
• For what reasons did King support direct action techniques?
• How did King define an unjust law?
• What is the significance to his audience of King’s closing?

Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Justice — Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere

Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere

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Published: Aug 24, 2023

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Table of contents

Introduction: the essence of justice and its universal implications, the ripple effect of injustice, undermining trust in institutions, social fabric and unity, human rights and moral imperative, a call to action: the power of collective efforts, from awareness to change, conclusion: championing justice as a collective imperative.

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Injustice Anywhere Is A Threat To Justice Everywhere Essay

When Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, he spoke about the need for justice and equality for all people, regardless of race. King understood that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. This is just as true today as it was then.

Slavery is one of the most obvious examples of injustice. It’s hard to imagine anything more unjust than one person owning another person and treating them as property. Slavery was abolished in the United States in 1865, but it still exists in many parts of the world today. Even in countries where slavery is not legal, there are still people who are treated as property. Women, for example, are often discriminated against and treated like second-class citizens.

Liberalism is based on the belief that all people are equal and should have the same rights and opportunities. Martin Luther King Jr. was a liberal, and he fought for the rights of all people, regardless of race. Today, there are still many people who believe in liberalism and fight for justice. However, there are also many people who believe that some groups of people are more deserving of justice than others.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We need to continue to fight for the rights of all people, no matter their race, gender, or any other characteristic. We need to stand up to discrimination and bigotry in all forms. Only then can we create a world that is truly just and equal for all.

Inconceivably, there are those who believe that what one does is just because it happens to be difficult or impossible. These people believe this way because they cannot comprehend how doing so would hurt someone else. In any case, the term injustice refers to anything from the absence of justice to its exact polar opposite. The word is used either in reference to a particular occurrence or even a larger event. Today, crime and social injustice are frequently mentioned together in the media.

There are people who will say that a single event, or even a person, can cause injustice. But is that really the case?

Slavery is probably one of the most well-known and largest examples of injustice in history. It was only within the last century or so that slavery was finally abolished. Even though it was abolished, there are still people today who live in conditions similar to slavery. Slavery is defined as “the state of one bound in servitude to a master.” This means that the slave has no freedom and is forced to work for the master. The slave is also considered property of the master and can be bought and sold like any other piece of property. Slavery is often seen as an unjust system because it takes away the freedom of the slave and treats them as if they are not a human being.

Liberalism is a political philosophy that believes in individual rights, liberty, and equality. Liberalism also believes in government by consent of the people. This means that the government should only have the power that the people allow it to have. Liberalism is often seen as a threat to justice because it can be used to justify any number of injustices. For example, some people believe that slavery was justified by liberalism because it allowed for the free market to exist. Others believe that liberalism is a threat to justice because it allows for too much freedom and not enough regulation.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a civil rights leader who fought for the rights of African Americans. He is best known for his “I Have A Dream” speech. In this speech, he talked about how he wanted to see a day when all people were treated equally. He also talked about how he wanted to see an end to discrimination and injustice. King was assassinated in 1968, but his dream is still alive today.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. This means that if there is one instance of injustice, it threatens the existence of justice altogether. Injustice is often seen as a threat to society because it can lead to more violence and crime. It can also lead to mistrust and hatred between people. Injustice is a problem that needs to be addressed in order to maintain a just society.

People may also come together and confront one other to either defend or dispute these faults. This may be examined in several historical cases, as well as those that encourage Martin Luther King Jr.’s belief that any place with injustice is a portent for the rest of society.

King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is an excellent example of someone who has been fighting for justice and agitating against the status quo to make a change. In his letter, King talks about his philosophy towards social change and how it should be done. He also addresses some of the criticisms he was receiving at the time. Despite all this, he still firmly believes that people have to stand up for what is right, even if it seems like an impossible task.

While there have been many movements since King wrote his letter, it seems like not much has changed in terms of how people view social injustice. There are still those who are content with the way things are and do not see any reason to try and fix something that is not broken. However, there are also plenty of people who are aware of the ills of society and are working to make a difference, even if it is just a small one.

It is important to note that social injustice does not only exist in America but all around the world. There are many countries that have a long history of slavery and oppression. Even though some of these countries have made great strides in recent years, there is still much work to be done in order to achieve true equality.

The fight for justice is an ongoing battle that will likely never be won completely. However, it is important to keep fighting for what is right and to never give up hope. As long as there are people who are willing to stand up against injustice, there is a chance that things can change for the better. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” This is as true now as it was when he first said it. In order to make the world a better place, we must all work together to fight against injustice in all its forms.

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This Quote Means: Said by Martin Luther King Jr., ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’

The line is often used to highlight the lack of socio-economic and/or political justice and also to demonstrate how various strands of society are interconnected. understanding this quote could be beneficial in the upsc cse's essay paper and the ethics (gs-iv) portion..

The quote “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” is one among many by American Baptist minister, civil rights activist and Nobel Laureate Martin Luther King Jr, which retains their relevance even today. The line is often used to highlight the lack of socio-economic and/or political justice and also to demonstrate how various strands of society are interconnected.

With regards to the UPSC-CSE examination, understanding this quote could be beneficial in the Mains examination’s Essay writing paper, and also in the Ethics (GS-IV) portion. We dive deeper into the quote and its significance.

What is the full quote?

This quote appears in a 1963 letter King wrote from the Birmingham Jail (in the state of Alabama) that was addressed to his “fellow clergymen”. King wrote the letter as a response to members of the clergy calling his activism “unwise and untimely”. King wrote:

“Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. 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.” he writes.

Through his words, King disposes of the notion that only the people directly affected by any sort of injustice can protest against it – he reasons that as human beings, we are all tied to one another, and what affects one community has the potential of affecting many others.

What does the quote mean?

In the years after the US Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation in 1954 in ‘Brown v Board of Education’, tensions erupted continuously between segregationists (white supremacists) and African American communities in various parts of the American South.

Birmingham Police, at this time, was notorious for its excessive use of force and brutality. In response, King and other civil rights activists created the ‘Birmingham Manifesto’, which called for justice through both Christian and American ideals. King and his supporters also held several non-violent protests, in keeping with the spirit of the manifesto. It was during one of these protests that he was arrested for violating a state order forbidding such demonstrations.

The letter can be read as a document detailing King’s understanding of civil disobedience and also his greater vision for humanity. For him, what affects even one person directly, has consequences for everyone else indirectly. He refuses to see society in silos, each group ‘protected’ via its own insularity. This is also the idea that reinforces racism, of keeping communities as far away from each other as possible, and what King fought against his entire life.

In the letter, King also talks about the complexity of the processes of legality and justice: “Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.”

Reading this along with the quote mentioned above, it is clear that King is also reflecting on how it is important to analyse how notions of justice overlap or diverge from what is strictly legal. If a law is being used to unfairly target individuals or a community, it must be rectified. It is not enough to think about our own benefits and selfish motives – in a democratic country, equality and equal treatment of all should be the primary concern.

Why the quote is relevant

King’s words resonate with one of the most famous World War II statements, frequently attributed to the German pastor Martin Niemöller:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

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Like King’s quote, this statement also highlights how it is ultimately the duty of everyone to speak out and act against injustice happening around them, whether or not they are directly affected.

Another less abstract way in which King’s words find resonance is through the concept of Public Interest Litigation (PIL), which incidentally also evolved during the 1960s in the US. It was formulated to provide legal representation to marginalised groups and interests because the legal services market failed to provide relevant services to large sections of the population and for issues that did not enjoy mainstream popularity.

In India, the PIL came about as a product of judicial activism. Supreme Court Justices V R Krishna Iyer and P N Bhagwati were the first to introduce the concept in India in the 1980s. Under this, any citizen or organisation can move a court for the enforcement of the rights of any person or a group who cannot access the remedies provided by the court due to material or any other kind of disadvantage.

The apex court further defined the PIL as “a legal action initiated in a court of law for the enforcement of public interest or general interest in which the public or a class of the community have pecuniary interest or some interest by which their legal rights or liabilities are affected”, in ‘ Janata Dal v H S Chowdhury’ (1992). The concept of PIL thus reinforces King’s words: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”.

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Arushi works with the online desk at The Indian Express. She writes on entertainment, culture, women's issues, and sometimes a mix of all three. She regularly contributes to the Explained and Opinion sections and is also responsible for curating the daily newsletter, Morning Expresso. She studied English literature at Miranda House, University of Delhi, along with a minor in Sociology. Later, she earned a post-graduate diploma in Integrated Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism, where she learnt the basics of print, digital and broadcast journalism. Write to her at [email protected]. You can follow her on LinkedIn and Instagram. ... Read More

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• My Reflections on MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail": A Letter to Amara and Anissa

My Reflections on MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail": A Letter to Amara and Anissa

Lester deanes.

Assistant Dean for Student Life calls for all to be more and do more in the struggle for justice, for this generation and the future.

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (1963)

When Anissa and Amara, my twin daughters, were born, my thoughts about why I work in Student Affairs in Jesuit higher education forever changed. I want my daughters to know that I leave them every day because the work
 I do speaks for my soul. My work reflects who I am, and this is the life I pray they will have someday too.

And yet, by the time Anissa and Amara are in college, I fear the world will not have changed enough. I am terrified by the biases and discrimination I see in my students and in the implicit biases I struggle to address within myself. I wonder if my daughters will still face injustice because of their mixed race, because of their gender, because . . .

In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. writes: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”(1) I chose Dr. King’s letter as my sacred text because it has become a significant resource and tool in my struggle against injustice. Dr. King asks his fellow clergy, and all his readers today: Will you stand with me? Is my struggle your struggle . . . our struggle? In our applications of Dr. King’s teaching in our life and work, we are called to address discrimination in multiple “anywheres” and “everywheres.” Our mutual concern for one another requires a shared vigilance to address personal and structural injustice. As the world continues to change, new challenges and different communities move to the margins. Every form of injustice affects us all, and we must stand with one another in order to make a more just world as fellow children of God.

In reexamining Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” within the context of my work in Jesuit higher education, a number of themes emerge: the importance of finding connection with others, an expanded vision of social justice to include multiple identity frames, and the importance of challenging the status quo as a necessary step in interrupting oppressive systems. Student Affairs at a Jesuit university is, at its core, rooted in the principles articulated during the Civil Rights Movement.

FINDING CONNECTIONS WITH OTHERS


The theme of discerning connections with others is set out at the start of Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” He begins by stating
 his purpose for being in Alabama: “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here . . . ‘thus saith the Lord,’ far beyond the boundaries . . . so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.”(2) As a student affairs practitioner, Dr. King’s reflections call me to care for and be concerned with those beyond my “hometown”—regardless of their community membership. Outside
 a student’s academic pursuits, there is no
greater purpose in Jesuit higher education than empowering students to find their connections within and beyond their root communities and subcommunities. And there is an inherent synergy between these expanding layers of interconnectedness and social justice.

In order for social justice to exist, there must be some level of caring for or connection with “the other.” In the context of my work in student affairs in Jesuit higher education, “the other” can mean any perspective or social identity beyond one’s own. Laws alone cannot create a just society. Attitudes and perspectives must shift to create lasting change. I have led various diversity workshops for hundreds of students at Santa Clara University and beyond. As a facilitator, I have learned that the best chance to change a student’s perspective comes from hearing his or her peers speak out of their different experiences. There is great power in creating opportunities for students to share across their diverse experiences. Lasting change comes from connecting minds and hearts, from sharing values and experiences, and from genuine dialogue. Although it is not
a simple task, dialogue serves as a catalyst for transformative change; it has the power to create the peace for which so many of us are searching. Personally, there are a number of perspectives that deeply challenge my own faith and values, but Dr. King’s letter reminds me to seek out places of dialogue; it is only in making room to be connected with “the other” that I become whole and authentic myself.

AN EXPANDED VISION OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

I wonder what Dr. King would say about our current struggles in the United States and around the globe. Issues of racism, sexism, and classism often dominate public discourse, and yet the topic of public conversation regularly shifts to accommodate the next great tragedy. Pathways toward transformative change
 are challenging; they require a sustained commitment to dialogue. I think Dr. King would be disappointed with our progress.

In the past 50 years, communities on the margins have shifted to include those struggling with issues of nationality, disability, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status. Santa Clara University’s mission and vision statement is centered on the creation of a “more humane, just, and sustainable world.”(3) As a Jesuit institution, we must ask ourselves if we are providing the support needed to ensure that all students, faculty, staff, administrators, and community members are able to thrive. Dr. King’s letter illustrates an expanded
vision of social justice; his concern and commitment extends to those of multiple and diverse communities. “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states.”(4)

In student affairs, we regularly talk with our students about the interrelatedness of multiple social and communal identity frames, such as gender, sexual orientation, faith, body image, age, nationality, disability, and socioeconomic status. I often ask myself and my students to consider which perspectives, communities, or voices are missing from their circles and conversations. On a daily basis I’m challenged by this concept and I’m also challenged by
the ways many of my students engage those
of other faiths, cultures, and traditions. I feel called to encourage my students to apply this concept of interrelatedness to their everyday interactions with others; to think critically about the significance of their behavior in and outside the classroom. Students should consider other communities and social identities when selecting a Halloween costume, or the language they use to describe others on social media.
Dr. King calls us to expand our perspective of community to include those on and outside
the margins. In order to be congruent in our faith and community values, we must practice the principles of social justice in all spaces and places of our lives.

CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO

The last theme that emerges for me through my reflections on Dr. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is his commitment to challenging the status quo. Democracy is rooted in and responsive to action. Silence and passivity have never moved a democracy to be concerned about the marginalized. Rather, “Injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent, and determined action.”(5)

But “strong, persistent, and determined” action takes coalition building. In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King highlights
all the committed individuals and institutions actively working alongside him in the Civil Rights Movement. “Letter from Birmingham Jail” took on new meaning for me when I rediscovered that Dr. King congratulated Spring Hill College, a Jesuit institution, for their efforts to desegregate well before other colleges and universities in the South. In fact, Spring Hill College was the only college to desegregate for 10 years in the South.(6)

Spring Hill College thus serves as an example for the active role Jesuit universities can play in fighting injustice. Spring Hill College challenged the status quo not because it was easy or popular but because it was just. These actions showed a genuine willingness to stand in solidarity with those on the margins without concern for personal or institutional gain.

Spring Hill College thus serves as an example for the active role Jesuit universities can play in fighting injustice. Spring Hill College challenged the status quo not because it was easy or popular but because it was just. These actions showed a genuine willingness to stand
in solidarity with those on the margins without concern for personal or institutional gain. The leadership demonstrated by the Spring Hill College community should not be forgotten and continues to impact generations of students. I have a profound sense of gratitude that another Jesuit institution was willing to be the first to take that critical step for justice.(7)

I am equally proud of the steps my own institution, Santa Clara University, has taken to support undocumented students, both the emotional and financial support of the Jesuit community, as well as the University’s advocacy efforts toward immigration reform. However, we have a long way to go.

We must ask, as a community that strives for social justice, are any of our policies or traditions adversely impacting our community members? We should consider reviewing our policy regarding domestic partners living on campus in the residence halls. If we do not explicitly recognize these partnerships, the quality of life for on-campus professional faculty and staff is compromised and our campus community becomes less than welcoming for the LGBTQ community.

  Injustice is a disease that can infect all of us, and the only cure is genuine dialogue and a willingness and commitment to stand with the marginalized. Through genuine dialogue, I have been able to unpack and examine the places
 in my life where I have oppressed others, an intense but hugely important emotional process of exposing my vulnerabilities. Likewise, Dr. King’s letter challenges our students, faculty, staff, administrators, and alumni to consider these questions: Did you seek to make a connection today with your fellow community members? Did you engage in genuine dialogue with someone different from yourself? Did you challenge what was unjust in the status quo?
 I hope when my daughters read this essay, they will understand how much I love them and the work I do. I work at Santa Clara University because I am challenged on a daily basis to be more and to do more for the students and communities we serve. We cannot be leaders in immigration rights and not be leaders in gender equity; support for underrepresented students, and leaders in advocacy for students with disabilities. More is required of us. Meeting legal requirements or measuring up to our peer institutions is not enough. Magis . More is required of me if I am going to be the role model and example my children need. Instead of settling for the status quo, we must engage in the ever messy, ever ongoing dialogue required to form a just community.

LESTER DEANES is an Assistant Dean for Student Life at Santa Clara University, where he is responsible for engaging staff, faculty, and students to promote an inclusive campus community. His higher education research interests are in first-year students, students of color, and first-generation college students.  

• Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail, 1963,” in Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s: A Brief History with Documents , ed. David Howard-Pitney (New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2004), 75.
• See Santa Clara University vision statement: http://www.scu.edu/jesuit/University-Mission.cfm
• Spring Hill College, (n.d.) About SHC: History of Spring Hill College ,, http://www.shc.edu/about/history-spring-hillcollege (January 16, 2013).

For the hundreds watching online and the too many to count who filled two courtrooms to support Mark and got to witness it firsthand, Mark led the jury through what this case is really about: corruption. The corruption of our institutions, our higher education system, our media, and sadly, our society writ large. It is perhaps fate that the trial was postponed to this week, the week we recognize the contributions and life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who wrote from jail in 1963 that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." That is the heart of this case as Mark noted. Corruption spreads, he reminded the jury repeatedly, and if those responsible are not held accountable, corruption erodes everything it touches until we are left with nothing.

With news coming at us every second these days, it can be hard to recall the scandal that engulfed Penn State back in 2011/2012 and the later lack of full culpability by those in charge. And if we go back to Mark's original article in National Review that is exactly his point — an institution that cares more about its reputation and legacy than the protection of the innocent is corrupt. Penn State's president Graham Spaniel was eventually fired and did go to jail, albeit for a short period of time, for covering up the truly disgusting crimes committed by Jerry Sandusky — crimes he had full knowledge of well before the scandal became public. But again, those in charge at Penn State cared more about their legacy and reputation than the children Sandusky violated. And if Penn State leadership had no qualms about covering up the sexual abuse of children, would covering up research for a member of its faculty be out of the realm of the possible?

So, in (the sad) case you missed it, below is just a sampling of some of the best of Mark today (if the Court publicly releases the transcript, we'll be sure to send out the link):

"I have no difficulty standing on the truth. The truth of what I wrote, the truth about what happened at a famous American institution, the truth about this man." "In my world, I can write something, Mr Simberg can write something, and Mr Mann can write something – and you're free to read all or none, and decide what weight to attach to all or none. But, in Mr Mann's world, there's his take – and everyone else has to be hockey-sticked into submission and silence." "He's a classic example of the guy who can dish it out but can't take it." "'Michael Mann has never been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize' – that's a direct quote from the then Director of the Nobel Institute in Norway, Geir Lundestad... He's not a Nobel Prize recipient. A decade after he was told to cut it out by the actual winner of the Nobel prize, [Mann] continues to promote one of the most brazen of scientific frauds – that he is of the same rank as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Francis Crick or my fellow Canadian Sir Frederick Banting, the discoverer of insulin and its use in treating diabetes. How big a fraud do you have to be to keeping putting yourself up there with Einstein and Sir Frederick and Madam Curie when the Nobel Institute itself has told you you're not?" "I play the ball, not the man." (Mark then quoted Eleanor Roosevelt, "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people," to drive home the point.)

The trial will continue Monday morning and is expected to last another two-to-three weeks. We'll continue to report daily when Court is in session and we'll provide weekend reports too! And if anyone has any remaining questions about the motivation of the plaintiffs in this case, we share this email that was displayed today:

We believe justice will prevail. As Mark said, "I stand by every word."

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