Review of King's Letter from Birmingham Jail

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Goodreads says this is 50 pages long, I found a really nice small version of about 100 pages with big fonts and large margins (very very good for annotating, my copy looks like a sketch book now) on the book sellers on the east side of Central Park near 61st street. It is published by the Martin Luther King Jr. Library with an afterword by Reginald Betts, if you can find that version buy it, it’s great. I read the first half on an uncomfortable plane ride and the second with a pot of tea overlooking the Bosphorus Bridge.

Style

Let me start this by saying the three stars is because I don’t love the prose and some of the rhetorical tricks Dr King uses, I could write a lot about this but I would like to focus on the substance so I will try to keep it brief (post writing it I did not keep it brief). This does not actually matter for the letters historical/cultural/ impact, I am just being snobby.

On the Prose

This work has some fucking banger lines that get mixed up by cheap metaphors and over reliance on adjectives. I do want to stress that King kinda knows this at the end of the letter/book he says:

Never before have I written a letter this long (or should I say a book?)… I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else is there to do when you are alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think strange thoughts, and pray long prayers?

I love this paragraph it is very humanising and for some reason relatable. That being said I think he or his editors would have caught a lot of the at times poor prose. It was written in a phonetic haze on toilet paper and the empty spaces on newspaper and smuggled out by his lawyer.

There are some fucking banger lines in this book, that are followed by some mediocre writing.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

Great start, the next line tries to draw out a Subjects are mediated through Universals (in Hegelian terms) or a Spinozist Monism point, but the wording I find a bit cringe. This is the same type of cringe all writers sometimes write (especially me, I am very guilty of this), however this phraseology is trying too hard to be poetic and ends up falling a little flat.

Another example of a paragraph for which I love the sentiment but I feel the writing kind of falls flat:

So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a taillight behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice.

I like the twilight headlight metaphors, and combined with the “exit” phraseology it has a cogent kinetic and directional motif; he could cut a lot of the words and employ more bland words to extenuate the effect of the metaphors.

Another example of a paragraph for which I love the sentiment but I feel the writing kind of falls flat:

We must not forget that all three men were crucified for the same crime—the crime of extremism. Two were extremist for immorality, and thusly fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment

This one mirrors the last one (pun intended) where Subject is metaphor associated with something bad doing some action, while we should be like the metaphor associated with good doing the antonym of that action. Good dialectical framing but the magic of those metaphors could be so much stronger if the reader wasn’t dragged through it.

On the Sneaky Rhetoric

Won’t go as far on this because I understand this is a letter intended to be affective for the effect of progressing the civil rights movement. But there is a lot of Ad Hominems, False Dilemmas, Strawmanning and some circular reasoning. I will touch on some of them later when I talk about the Euthyphro but keep an eye out for them when reading it. I really do get it though, if I was MLK and received a letter like that from my peers I would employ the same semi-raging rhetoric. When I do it I am usually arguing with my significant other/family/close friends, it is effective for a political movement but not always internally valid.

This was what a couple of the clergymen said in response to the letter, with only one of the 8 addressed being swayed to join MLK’s fight for civil rights (I read this in the afterword). However the letter impacted the minds of millions of unintended others and will continue to as long as history is allowed to be studied.

Organisation

My print of the book had loose header markers but any version online will just be the base text. I would organise the text with

  1. The original letter from the 8 Clergy: not included in some texts online, worth finding before you engage with the text
  2. Why King needed to be in Birmingham despite being an “outsider”
  3. When and why direct action is necessary, and the concept of creative tension
  4. Why it couldn’t “wait”
  5. Euthyphro continued: his take on laws, justice and morality
  6. White moderates are a bigger obstacle than the KKK for putting order above justice
  7. Why he’s not an “extremist” but an “extremist of love”; warning about Elijah Muhammad/Malcolm X as the “real extremism,” i.e. violence
  8. Shitting on the Church’s lack of leadership and its silence on anti-segregation
  9. Police are not nice; brutally preserving order, not serving justice
  10. Apologies for the length of the letter

For a wider thematic grouping I would say:

  • Framing and Formalities: points 1, 10
  • Direct Action and Protests: points 2, 3, 4, 7
  • Moral Philosophy on Justice and Laws: point 5
  • The Order-Keepers: points 6, 8, 9 (the white moderates, the church, the police)

I would like to go through some of these as I think they are interesting.

Direct Action and Protests (points 2, 3, 4, 7)

Direct Action Playbook

King’s line in 2) “an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” is so powerful. It introduces King’s underlying moral of univocity. He goes on tacitly call the Clergymen “superficial social analyst[s]” in their “deploring” of the demonstration, making the Marxian point that they “look merely at effect and do not grapple with underlying causes.” He says it is regrettable that DA was needed but lays out the 4 steps that make it necessary.

  1. Collection of the facts to determine what injustices are alive
  2. Negotiation
  3. Self Purification (preparation of the psyche to act non-violently in the face of violence)
  4. Direct Action

King goes through and elaborates on how they did it but some historical background is useful. Before the SCLC arrived the black community had been negotiating for 3 years with the city of Birmingham to remove the coloured only signs. Negotiations themselves did not sway many stores to drop their segregationist policies, leading to their first DA, the “Selective Buying Campaign”. This was a citywide boycott of segregated stores which was successful enough to convince some shop owners to drop their “whites only” banners. This came to a halt after Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor threatened to send building inspectors to “find violations” and revoke their business licence if they complied.

The natural step would then be to go and attempt negotiation with the government. However, at that time Birmingham was in the middle of an election cycle, where Bull Connor was standing. This leads us to the point of 3) which is the first instance of semantic confusion.

King is quite adamant that “wait has almost always meant never,” and that “too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue.” He understands that “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” He rhetorically reinforces the urgency and their impatience with a beautiful 3 pages elucidating the generations of abuse and discrimination the black community of the US has endured; ending with “I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”

However, he did “wait”, the SCLC delayed any DA until after the election so as to not advantage Connor’s campaign. When the election was inconclusive leading to a runoff, they further delayed until Connor’s opponent Albert Boutwell eventually won the newly created mayoral seat (they previously had three commissioners).

The day after Boutwell was elected (2 April 1963), they issued the Birmingham Manifesto on 3 April and began demonstrations that same day. According to King’s framework they should have attempted to engage in negotiation rather than engage in direct confrontation. While some will argue the Manifesto was their negotiation, this can not be called an attempt at good faith negotiation; it was a list of very reasonable demands which they did not wait for a response for.

So King says to attempt negotiations first, and says to never wait while acting against these two principles. The wait that triggered his emotional response was the invoking of “wait” by white moderates as a means of preserving order. The wait he engaged with was strategic. Unfortunately, we don’t have a way in the English language to clarify this semantic ambiguity. I don’t think all the clergymen meant “wait” in the first sense, but they intended him to engage in negotiations and hold off on the protests. I don’t disagree with this point in theory, however Boutwell was also a segregationist, and as King states:

The new administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one before it acts. We will be sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Mr Boutwell will bring the millennium to Birmingham”

King was definitely right in this point, however, for the sake of spectacle it would have been fruitful to engage in one dialogue before engaging in DA, just to be able to say you tried.

This brings up a critical conflict in leftist circles that dates all the way back to the Young Hegelians: when do you mend the system or break the system. King will go on to describe how he sees the laws he was breaking as unjust, thus he broke them as well as introduce a critical concept of “creative tension.”

Creative Tension

He brings up creative tension as an answer for why nonviolent DA is the right decision. He asserts from the beginning that DA’s end is for negotiations, “the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.” He breaks the process into 4 sections:

  1. Create/bring to light a crisis in a community
  2. Create tension around this crisis by performing discontent
  3. Dramatise the issue in the media and general culture
  4. Engage in negotiations with the authoritative body powerful enough to enact change.

He makes an allusion to Socrates here (he does this several time throughout the letter).

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.

In Hegelian terms this is a manifestation of the Zeitgeist, with DA allowing him to bring in mini-Napoleons as a Force to press history forward onto “Freedom”. Through Post Modern thought we can see how MLK was an early adopter of the Spectacular economy, we use DA for the explicit end of performing discontent and allowing that meme to inoculate society, shifting the Zeitgeist.

It is important to note that MLK studied Hegel and wrote extensively on Hegelian thought while at Boston University. While Hegel was his favourite philosopher he was also heavily inspired by Kant, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche (he’s just like me fr).

For a practical example of creative tension in use, Egypt’s Mubarak and Libya’s Gaddafi fell because Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, shouted at the police “How do you expect me to make a living?” before burning himself; this was the ignition of the Arab Spring.

Legality of Direct Action

In the United States the right to free assembly is in the constitution. In April 1963, King and his comrades were held in criminal contempt for violating a state court injunction that barred them from protesting. This case, Walker v. City of Birmingham (1967), went to the supreme court and lost 5-4, with most of the court believing the state injunction to be unconstitutional however stating the protesters were required to obey it or challenge it in court before violating it. They could not ignore a court order and raise its unconstitutionality as a defence after the fact. This is called the “collateral bar rule.” The SCLC learnt this lesson; when the city ordered an injunction the next time, they challenged the order in the courts first and then broke it. This case, Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham (1969), went to the supreme court and won.

Additional notes on the legal do’s and don’ts of protesting in the US while researching this:

  • Protest in public areas is protected, however the government can restrict the place if it has a legitimate non-speech reason (security, operations). (Edwards v. South Carolina and Adderley v. Florida)
  • Symbolic speech is highly protected. You can wear what you want, burn flags no matter how offensive it is (this applies for everyone from SCLC to KKK). Destruction is illegal when it is someone else’s property or creates an imminent physical danger
  • Disruptions will pretty much always lead to jail time, get a permit if you are going to be taking a street.
  • The necessity defense almost never works, unless the judge allows it to be decided by a jury. You can’t blow up a pipeline or destroy military equipment and say it was needed. You can negotiate with the target, sue them, lobby against them, boycott them or create laws against the behaviour but post-hoc rationalising of terrorism will always lead to an indictment.
  • If the audience/people are hostile to you, the police can not ask you to stop speaking. The police must protect the speaker, not silence them to appease a hostile crowd. The exception is if your speech is directed at inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce it, this is of course unless you’re the president crying about losing an election. Fun fact: the precedent for the incitement standard comes from a KKK rally (Brandenburg v. Ohio), while the ACLU’s most infamous free-speech stand was defending the Nazis’ right to march through Skokie.

Extremism

MLK modifies the allegation that he is an extremist by stating he is an “extremist of love”, meaning those who break an unjust law openly and lovingly, with a willingness to accept the penalty. He calls out Elijah Muhammad by name, indicating the true extremists are The Nation of Islam. He highlights how they see all white people as devils, mirroring the same oppressive metaphysic that white oppressors use against blacks; really putting the revolution in revolutionary. In Baudrillardian terms these are people who, for the sake of defeating the all powerful force of evil, become evil itself. Non-violent protest demonstrates to evil that they are evil, any flirtation with hate and alienation produces more evil.

I would argue that MLK is right here in the absolute sense. History is a process; the superstructure is embedded into the syntax of culture, and unless you want to genocide your own citizens (as Mao did for precisely this purpose in the Great Leap Forward of 1958–62 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76) you must work to change the system.

The revolutionary who reaches for the gun is simply lazy: he wants to seize the superstructure before the base has shifted, and so he inherits and recreates the very oppressive forms he meant to destroy. In 1930 Gandhi walked to the sea rather than to the armoury, and so did King in Alabama. The martyr wins because he forces evil to look at itself and find no enemy worthy of the name, only its own face. The gunman loses because he hands evil exactly the adversary it needs.

Moral Philosophy on Justice and Laws (point 5)

In my reading MLK introduces seven propositions on what separates a just law from an unjust one. I have tagged each as theological (theos, G-d in Greek) or philosophical (sophia, wisdom in Greek):

  1. (THEOS) “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law” or eternal/natural law.
  2. (SOPHIA) “Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust”
  3. (SOPHIA) Segregation positions the relationship of every person in the segregated class as an “I-it” (Subject-Object) relationship rather than “I-thou” (Subject-Subject).
  4. (THEOS) Sin is separation, “Isn’t segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?”
  5. (SOPHIA) “An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself… On the other hand a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal”
  6. (SOPHIA) “An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because they did not have the unhampered right to vote”.
  7. (SOPHIA) An unjust law is not congruent with the constitution of the society (its founding myth), in this case “All men are created equal”

They split into two registers, the theological and the philosophical. The theological pair are the more interesting, so I’ll take them first.

Theological. His anchor at 1) is the most interesting point of the seven. MLK seems to borrow at least his rhetoric from St Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas being one of the most impactful figures to have expressed the point. I connect it back to the Euthyphro, which I have previously written on here: in Socrates’ elenchus he offers Euthyphro a rare positive thesis to chew on, that being “Piety is the part of the just concerned with tending to the Gods (12e)“. In Socrates’ trial he was charged with impiety, specifically failing to acknowledge the Gods of the city and introducing new deities. In his “apology” he retorts that he believes in divine signs (daimonia) and holds the utmost reverence for the Oracle at Delphi (whom he used to prove he was the wisest man). I bring this up because when Socrates makes Piety (which we can imagine as a euphemism for the Good/moral) the part of justice that relates to the Gods, he is no literalist: Socrates was a mystic, and his Gods were not the lascivious Zeus or the vindictive Hera but a power and spirit that has bled through the cracks of knowledge for as long as it has existed. I think MLK is drawing his moral/natural law from the same well, that which seeks to drive the unity of spirit. Very Spinozist, very Hegelian very cool.

The second theological proposition borrows from Paul Tillich, whom King quotes: “sin is separation”. King then asks, “Isn’t segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?” Sin is such a massive subject that it is hard to tell whether MLK means separation is a property of sin, is equivalent to it, or is identical to it, and the difference matters theologically. I want to believe he is making the strong claim of identity, that separation is not merely functionally the same as sin but the same object/force. It goes back to the Original Sin, when Adam’s rib was separated and led man to separate from G-d.

Philosophical. The plainest of the philosophical propositions is that “any law that uplifts human personality is just [and] any law that degrades human personality is unjust”. Personality, in a theological context, could mean divinity or particularity (the differentiation of the universal into distinct species or forms), but the formulation is so abstract that it means almost nothing; it functions more as rhetorical propaganda, dignifying the individual in a country built on individuality.

More useful is the relational point: segregation positions every member of the segregated class as an “I-it” (Subject-Object) rather than an “I-thou” (Subject-Subject). The oppressed are seen only for their utility. Taking it directly from the Hegelian Lord-Bondsman dialectic that Martin Buber is drawing on, they are the bondsmen made to create and confirm the world of the lords, on pain of total negation (death).

Then the equality formulation: “an unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself… a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal”. Standard stuff, since extended in the ways this meme lays out.

Close behind is the franchise version: “an unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because they did not have the unhampered right to vote”. An unrelated thought, but via this maxim should we not nullify every law written before universal suffrage (which we don’t even have now, given the legal fuckery around citizenship, and children can’t vote either)? I’m quite for that idea. And what happens when new people enter the voting pool (a child turns 18, marriage, etc.), should we then have to nullify, re-litigate or re-affirm each of those laws? I’m even more for that, it helps spoiled laws expire.

Last and weakest is that an unjust law is not congruent with the constitution of the society (its founding myth), in this case “all men are created equal”. I don’t really care for this one, as I generally think the constitution is pretty shit (from an epiphenomenal perspective). It might genuinely mean something to King, but it sounds like an appeal to authority to me.

Morality is contingent on the time and MLK certainly would be found guilty of certain things in our time (this document is mostly lies but several accounts have been independently verified).

The Order-Keepers (points 6, 8, 9)

His main point here is a continuation of the commentary on unjust laws, he sees it as an imperative to stand up to them beginning the section with “everything Hitler did in Germany was legal”.

Then the famous passage:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s 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 can’t agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.

I have been writing this for 4 days now so I won’t go into this more but he makes similar points about the church and how it has fallen from its previous guiding role in society, into the realm of the order keepers.

In general this is alluding to the responsibility that comes with being a citizen rather than merely a person, a responsibility owed upward to the higher power of the republic. Those who can act without consequence will act without care, unless they internalise the responsibility inherent in democracy, or really in any society.

Works Cited

Cases Referenced

  • Adderley v. Florida. 1966.
  • Brandenburg v. Ohio. 1969.
  • Edwards v. South Carolina. 1963.
  • National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie. 1977.
  • Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham. 1969.
  • Walker v. City of Birmingham. 1967.

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