“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.”
King had not heard white ministers tell their flocks that integration was morally right and the Negro was their brother. Instead, “in the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro,” he had watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and “mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.” At other times they had been arch defenders of the status quo. “I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states,” King wrote. “On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward…. 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 the 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?’
“… 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.” The judgment of God is on the church as never in history. “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.”
But even if the white church ignores us, “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 forebearers labored in this country without wages…. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the oppression 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.”
King wanted to mention one other point in the clergymen’s statement which troubled him profoundly. They warmly commended the Birmingham police for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” King did not share their praise for the police, not when they subjected Negroes here in the city jail to “ugly and inhumane treatment,” cursed and pushed old Negro women and young girls, kicked and slapped old Negro men and young boys. Not when their purpose was “to preserve the evil system of segregation.” King wished the clergymen had commended the Negro demonstrators of Birmingham for their courage, discipline, and willingness to suffer in the midst of provocation. One day the South would recognize its real heroes. They were the James Merediths, the old and battered women of the Montgomery bus boycott, the students and young ministers of the sit-ins who had struggled for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values of America’s Judaeo-Christian heritage.
“Never before have I written so long a letter,” King said. “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?”
King wrote the last portion of his letter on a legal pad furnished by his attorneys. He begged the clergymen to forgive him if he had overstated the truth or been unreasonably impatient. He begged God to forgive him, though, if he had understated the truth or settled for anything less than brotherhood. “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.” He signed his name and laid his pen aside, worn out by his effort.
The Birmingham police knew nothing about King’s composition. His lawyers smuggled it out page by page, and Walker and others typed it in a fever of excitement at the Gaston Motel. “This is going to be one of the historic documents of this movement,” Walker exclaimed. What should they entitle it? “Call it ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ ” Walker said. First published in pamphlet form by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” also appeared in the Christian Century, Liberation, the New Leader, and many other periodicals, with almost a million copies circulating in the churches and other copies finding their way to Robert Kennedy, Burke Marshall, and others in Washington. The “Letter” became a classic in protest literature, the most eloquent and learned expression of the goals and philosophy of the nonviolent movement ever written. The eight Alabama clergymen never responded. “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was unanswerable.
ON SATURDAY, APRIL 20, King and Abernathy posted $300 cash bonds and walked out of Birmingham jail together, both sporting eight-day beards. Their contempt trial for violating the court injunction was scheduled for Monday, and King’s attorneys, a highpowered team from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, had persuaded him to post bail so that they could consult over the weekend. Because of all the publicity surrounding his arrest and imprisonment, King’s lawyers wanted to convert the trial into a great court drama, to focus attention on the whole legal structure of segregation. But King rejected the idea. He thought it would confuse the issue and divert local and national attention away from the central goal of breaking the city’s racial barriers. No, the main attack must remain in the streets.
To his dismay, though, the demonstrations had dwindled to mostly small-scale picket lines and sit-ins involving only a dozen volunteers a day. True, northern-based civil-rights groups were starting nationwide boycotts of chain stores with branches in Birmingham. Moreover, thanks to the enterprise of a brilliant young Negro minister named Vincent Harding, tentative negotiations had begun with representatives of Birmingham’s business community, and ad hoc groups were now meeting in unofficial, semiprivate sessions in churches, homes, and deserted buildings. But it was clear to King’s advisers that they must escalate the pressure before serious negotiations could begin. Something had to be done to stimulate recruiting, to get people marching again.
On Monday King and his colleagues climbed the steps of the Jefferson County courthouse, a nine-story
building with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson engraved over the entrance: “Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion.” Inside, “WHITE” and “COLORED” signs marked restrooms and water fountains. Shuttlesworth liked to say that God had made water and that water was free, yet here the segregationists were, trying to separate something that was free. This illustrated what “a silly thing” segregation was and how it made “folks who are supposed to have a lot of sense act as if they never known what sense was.” If the segregationists kept on, he guessed they would try to segregate the air after a while.
The contempt trial, a protracted legal battle lasting most of the week, took place in the courtroom of Judge William A. Jenkins, Jr., a husky Birmingham native. As it happened, city attorneys had charged King, Abernathy, Walker, and Shuttlesworth with both criminal and civil contempt—a potentially stupid move so far as King was concerned. Conviction for criminal contempt would send him to jail for only a few days. But if convicted for civil contempt, he would have to remain imprisoned until he apologized for his “offense,” recanted his public statements about violating the court injunction, and promised the judge never to break it again. In short, he could stay incarcerated as long as he wanted.
But apparently the judge was smarter than the city lawyers. On Friday he dropped the civil contempt charge and found the defendants guilty of the lighter offense. The judge never gave the reason for his decision, but a couple of legal experts have pointed to a practical consideration: “None of the business leaders relished the idea of Martin Luther King languishing indefinitely in a Birmingham jail, while a national campaign to free him created terrible publicity for the city.” In what was known as The City of Birmingham v. Wyatt Tee Walker et al., or simply the Walker case, Judge Jenkins sentenced the four defendants to serve five days in jail, commencing May 16. King’s lawyers appealed, and King himself announced that the mild sentence indicated that the bastions of segregation in Birmingham were crumbling.
But in truth it was the movement that was crumbling. By the end of the week, demonstrations had all but stopped, and Young and Walker said the situation was desperate. “We needed more troops,” Walker recalled. “We had scraped the bottom of the barrel of adults who would go [to jail]…. We needed some new something.” Out of spirited SCLC strategy sessions came a portentous decision. King’s young lieutenants—Bevel, Lee, Dorothy Cotton, and others—had been out working in the city’s Negro colleges and high schools spreading King’s nonviolent message,” and several college students had become involved in the campaign. Now, though, his staff would actively recruit high-school students to fill up their depleted ranks. King conceded that this would be controversial, but “we needed this dramatic new dimension.”
What happened next made movement history. At the urging of King’s young aides, hundreds of high-school students swarmed into SCLC workshops at the churches, all raring to march. But so did hundreds of their little brothers and sisters from the grade schools. “We had a terrible time trying to keep them out,” Lee said. But the youngsters kept coming back, begging Bevel and Lee to let them march and go to jail with the big kids. Finally, Bevel went to King with an idea: why not launch a “D Day” when hundreds of school children of all ages would get arrested and imprisoned?
King gave this careful thought. Sending children into the streets was bound to provoke hostile criticism. Yet it might be the very thing he needed to revive the campaign and shock the city’s business leaders to the bargaining table. Schoolchildren didn’t hold jobs, so whites couldn’t threaten them with economic reprisals as they did their elders. Thousands of demonstrating youngsters would tie up downtown Birmingham, and their arrests would cause a colossal overload of juvenile courts. With the children, King might literally be able to fill up the jails.
True, there were high risks involved. Some of the children might get hurt—or worse. But Negro children were maimed every day of their lives in the segregated South. If an incessant torture could be ended by a single climactic confrontation, he thought it worth the risk. Also, “our family life will be born anew if we fight together.” And, too, the spectacle of schoolchildren marching for their freedom might awaken the entire country. “I hope to subpoena the conscience of the nation to the judgment seat of morality,” he had said of his campaign. And here seemed a dramatic and symbolic way to do it.
And so he agreed to let the children march. In a staff meeting on May 1, he decided that the next day would be D Day—the start of a children’s crusade to save the soul of Birmingham once and for all.
The next day more than 1,000 excited youngsters—some only six years old—thronged Sixteenth Street Baptist, King’s “church command post,” as Time called it. From here, adults and special march marshals led the children downtown two abreast, column after column, singing and clapping in holiday merriment. When Bull Connor saw all those “little niggers” demonstrating in his town, he charged about in a rage, commanding his men to lock them all up. As the police set about making arrests, the children delighted in confusing them: a decoy group would lead them astray while the main column would proceed to its downtown target. In one demonstration, a gruff cop confronted an eight-year-old walking with her mother. “What do you want?” the policeman asked. She looked him straight in the eye. “Fee-dom,” she said.
In all, the police arrested more than 900 young people that day and had to bring in school buses to cart them all to jail. One police captain was deeply troubled by that sight. “Evans,” he told another officer, “ten or fifteen years from now, we will look back on all this and we will say, ‘How stupid can you be?’ ”
King and his lieutenants all rejoiced in the day’s success. “Oh man,” Walker exclaimed, “it’s a great time to be alive.” King himself had seen the encounter between the cop and the little girl. “It was beautiful!” He recalled what an old woman had said about her involvement in the Montgomery bus boycott: “I’m doing it for my children and for my grandchildren.” Seven years later, King mused, “the children and grandchildren were doing it for themselves.” As he expected, many newsmen deplored his “using” the children in this fashion. But he wanted to know where these writers had been “during the centuries when our segregated social system had been misusing and abusing Negro children.”
Meanwhile his aides were drumming up an even larger children’s march for the next day. “I want everybody to listen to me,” Bevel told a rally of prospective young volunteers. “You get an education in jail, too. In the schools you’ve been going to, they haven’t taught you to be proud of yourselves and they haven’t taught you good history—they haven’t taught you the price of freedom…. As long as one Negro kid is in jail, we all want to be in jail. If everybody in town would be arrested, everybody would be free, wouldn’t they?”
That message worked like magic. The next day some 2,500 youngsters turned out to march, so revved up that King and his staff could scarcely restrain them. “Yesterday was D Day in Birmingham,” King said happily. “Today will be Double D Day.” He admonished his young followers, “Don’t get tired. Don’t get bitter. Are you tired?” “No!” they screamed back. Then off they went with their adult leaders, heading toward town with signs that read “FREEDOM.”
As King and his men coordinated the marching columns, he could see the first one bearing down on a line of police and firemen, deployed by Bull Connor to block off the route downtown. A crowd of Negro bystanders had gathered under the tall elms in nearby Kelly Ingram Park, and they surged forward when the students reached Connor’s barricade, shouting, “We want freedom!” It was a muggy afternoon, and the firemen stood sweating in dun-colored slickers, pointing highpowered firehoses at the marchers. And there was Bull Connor, a cigar in his mouth and a sweaty straw hat on his head, giving orders to his men. Several cops had German police dogs, which growled and strained at their leashes. When the demonstrators refused to return to the church, Connor bellowed, “Let ’em have it.” With scores of reporters and TV came
ramen recording what happened, the firemen turned on their hoses, which exploded with a noise like machine-gun fire and sent columns of water crashing into children and adults alike, knocking them down, ripping their clothes, smashing them against the sides of buildings, sweeping them back into the street, driving them crying and bloodied into the park. When Negro bystanders hurled bricks and bottles in retaliation, Connor unleashed the dogs. They charged into the Negroes’ ranks with fangs bared, lunging wildly at running children and biting three severely. In a cacophony of snarling dogs and screaming people, the march column disintegrated and children and adults all fled back to the church. “Look at those niggers run,” Connor sneered. When the carnage ended at three that afternoon, a great many people had been injured and 250 arrested. “God bless America,” said a reporter in disgust.
King too was revolted. If what had happened that day didn’t rouse the moral conscience of the nation, then it had no moral conscience. With eyes blazing, he told a thousand followers that night that they were going on despite the dogs and fire hoses. They were going on because they had started a fire in Birmingham that water could not put out. They were going on because they loved America and loved democracy. And they were going to remain nonviolent. “Don’t worry about your children who are in jail,” he cried. “The eyes of the world are on Birmingham.”
And they were indeed, as papers the next day carried front-page reports and photographs of Birmingham’s day of infamy. Millions of readers in America—and millions overseas—stared at pictures of police dogs lunging at young marchers, of firemen raking them with jet streams, of club-wielding cops pinning a Negro woman to the ground. And television news brought similar macabre sights into millions of living rooms. Abroad, African and European journals universally condemned such police brutality. At home, a storm of indignation broke over the land, as newspapers and politicians and labor and religious leaders all excoriated Bull Connor and the city of Birmingham. In Washington, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon declared that Birmingham “would disgrace the Union of South Africa.” President Kennedy told an irate group of Americans for Democratic Action that what he saw in the papers made him “sick,” but that there was nothing he could legally do to restrain Connor. Like his brother, the President regretted the timing of King’s campaign. Yet he was not asking for patience. “I can well understand why the Negroes of Birmingham are tired of being asked to be patient.” That same day, May 4, Burke Marshall, Robert Kennedy’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, flew to Birmingham to seek a settlement.
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