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Prophetie epistle

 by Edward Gilbreath

Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luthe

King, 3r.'s Letter from Birmingham

3ail and the Struggle Tha

Changed a NatioBy Jonathan Riede

Bloomsbury Press, 240 pp., $25.0

socially moderate Birmingham ministerThe group—composed of six Protestanministers, a Catholic bishop and a Jewisrabbi—was supportive of civil rights foNegroes but critical of King’s “extremeprotest methods, which the clergymefelt would lead to civil unrest and unnecessary violence. They referred to King aan “outsider  and criticized the movement for “unwise and untimely” demonstrations.

This attack both hurt and infuriateKing. Scrawling feverishly in the marginof the newspaper and on any other papescraps he could obtain, King fired off aalmost stream-of-consciousness rebuttaof the clergymen’s statement. His scribblings were gradually smuggled out othe jail by an aide and later edited into cohesive whole under the supervision oKing’s SCLC colleague Wyatt TeWalker.

Gospel o f Freedom  takes its title anmomentum from King’s words in the letter’s introduction defending his presenc

in Birmingham: “Just as the prophets othe eighth century B.C. left their villageand carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’fabeyond the boundaries of their homtowns, and just as the Apostle Paul le

 Ed wa rd Gilbreath is the author o f  Reconciliatio

Blues: A Black Evangelical’s Inside View o

White Christianity  and   Remembering Bir

mingham: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Lette

to America—50 Years Later.

dynamite of racism.” It was a city wherebullets, bombs and burning crossesserved as constant deterrents to AfricanAmericans who aspired to anythinggreater than their assigned station.There, during the spring of 1963, Kingand his associates in the SouthernChristian Leadership Conference staged

a nonviolent campaign that transformedAmerica.The campaign, which was aimed at

desegregating the city’s businesses andpublic facilities, started with a whimperbut would find its legs weeks later whenelementary and high-school studentswere recruited to participate in thedemonstrations. It is the iconic imagesof those children and teens marchingagainst the brutal assaults of Birming-ham public safety commissionerEugene “Bull” Connor’s fire hoses andpolice dogs that stunned the nationand led to the eventual dismantling ofthe Deep South’s elaborate systemof apartheid.

Rieder weaves this history in and outof his narrative, reminding us at everyturn just how fragile and human thedesegration effort was from the outset.On April 12,1963—Good Friday—Kingwas arrested for demonstrating on thestreets of Birmingham. He spent eightdays in solitary confinement. Meanwhile,

the movement threatened to implodefrom the weight of internal and externalforces—an initially unfocused strategy,infighting among the leadership, a Ken-nedy administration beholden to thevotes of segregationist Democrats, andconservative black businessmen uneasyabout the public protests.

King was slipped a copy of the localnewspaper in which he spotted a “Call toUnity” from a group of prominent,

Martin Luther King Jr. lived lessthan four decades, and his pub-lie life spanned only 13 years,

ending in 1968. In that time, the Baptistminister turned civil rights activistpricked the conscience of an Americathat was just a hundred years removedfrom Civil War and still wrestling to

make real its creed that “all men are ere-ated equal.” One of King’s most piercingproclamations of his faith-tinged mes-sage of nonviolent resistance was “Letterfrom Birmingham Jail,” a letter writtenin the tradition of the apostle Paul’sprison epistles. Barnard College sociolo-gist and historian Jonathan Rieder sur-veys the events that gave rise to King’smessage and offers a fresh perspectiveon the substance of the letter itself,which “provided nothing less than themoral and philosophical foundations” ofthe civil rights movement.

The year 1963 was a crucial one forKing. Many recall the August 1963March on Washington, which begatKing’s legendary “I Have a Dream”speech, as the defining moment of thecivil rights movement. But the setting forthe year’s most crucial action was notWashington, D.C., but Birmingham,Alabama.

Birmingham was a place described byKing as “the most thoroughly segregated

city in the United States.” It was a citywhere not only were libraries segregat-ed, but books containing images of blackrabbits and white rabbits on the samepage were banned from the shelves. Itwas a city where, according to a famousreport by  New York Times  correspon-dent Harrison Salisbury, “every mediumof mutual interest, every reasonedapproach, every inch of middle groundhas been fragmented by the emotional

36Christian Century April 17, 2013

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of the Birmingham letter as King’simpassioned, real-time reaction to theeight clergymen’s public censure of hismessage.

Though “Letter from BirminghamJail” did not play a role in resolving theimmediate conflict in Birmingham, itwould “spread beyond the events thatspawned it” and earn comparisons to

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and ÉmileZola’s “J’Accuse.” Weeks after theBirmingham campaign, condensed ver-sions of King’s missive found their wayto the public in publications such as the

 New York Post   and Reinhold Niebuhr’sChristianity and Crisis journal. But it wasnot until the June 12, 1963, issue of theC h r i s t i a n   C e n t u r y   that the completeletter was printed—along with an invita-tion for readers to send checks to sup-port the work of the SCLC. Perhaps

sensing the historic nature of their ges-ture, the editors wrote: “Believing thatthe document expresses, better than anyother we have seen, the quality of mindand spirit which informs the most impor-tant movement for integration in thesouth, we ... publish it as a contributionto justice in race relations and in thefaith that it will help heal a most grievouswound which this nation is inflictingupon herself.”

In an allegedly postracial America,we have yet to fully heal those self-

inflicted wounds. The election of a blackpresident and a keener awareness of thesystemic injustices facing people of colorhave not necessarily addressed the spiri-tual component of our dysfunction. But,as Rieder makes clear, the King whowrote “Letter from Birmingham Jail”was under no illusion that America was“a providential nation whose destinywas freedom.” He knew that it wouldrequire a dogged, ongoing commitmentto the gospel of freedom in order for “all

God’s children” to be at peace with oneanother.

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his village of Tarsus and carried thegospel of Jesus Christ to the far cornersof the Greco-Roman world, so am I com-pelled to carry the gospel of freedom farbeyond my own hometown. Like Paul, Imust constantly respond to the Mace-donian call for aid.”

Rieder traces the letter’s rhetoricalflow from King’s initial attempt to “win

over his critics through appeals to theirreason, sympathy, and conscience” to itssudden midpoint shift to a more bluntand indignant tone. “King drops themask,” says Rieder. “Instead of explain-ing himself, he chides and criticizes. Heshows himself to be not just a black manbut an angry black man. The diplomatgives way to the prophet.”

In a post-civil rights era that overtime has steadily tamed and sanitizedKing’s radical opposition to social injus-

tice, Rieder boldly hoists before us amore nearly complete Martin LutherKing Jr. whose profound appeals to non-violence were balanced by equallyaggressive calls to resist the spiritual cor-ruption and institutionalized racism ofAmerican society and, when necessary,its resultant laws. The author’s previousbook on King, The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me, provided a similarly insightfulcontribution to MLK scholarship, offer-ing an unvarnished meditation on King’sseveral voices—his black Baptist voice,

his community organizer voice and his“white” crossover voice. That bookrevealed King the bawdy jokester, Kingthe angry prophet—and above all Kingthe devout black churchman. Gospel of  Freedom  revives and deepens thatapproach, examining “Letter fromBirmingham Jail” as both King’s formalpublic response to white moderate criticsas well as an intimate, “transcribed formof oral culture” for his black allies.

Rieder examines the letter’s impor-

tance on political, spiritual and literarygrounds, but he also recognizes the doc-ument’s origins as a device for propa-ganda. Indeed, the idea of creating aprison epistle as a kind of press releasefor the movement had been floated dur-ing one of King’s earlier jail stints butwas nixed. While this speaks to the factthat there always had been a PR motivein mind, Rieder’s analysis leaves noquestion that he views the actual writing

Christian Century April 17, 20137

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