# 7 MLK Day

MLK Day

Would have entirely forgotten about Martin Luther King Day – and how very fine it is that this day is declared an official occasion! – had it not been for assorted on-line tributes that kept popping up this past week. Back when I left the States, on 2^nd April 1963, to try life in Europe, MLK Day didn’t exist. That was before the soon-to-come wave of Sixties assassinations (Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King), of those promising young men, gunned down in the time-worn US tradition because someone considered them too much of a threat.

Clearly, I knew who King was. No one who’d demonstrated against what we then called racial prejudice, just as, conversely, no one who embraced racial prejudice in the thoughtless hope of feeling a faint but necessary sense of superiority, of “somebodiness”, could fail to know who King was. But I’d left the country behind and now depended on foreign media. US news came, thus, gradually to seem that much less immediate. Two weeks after our freighter left Brooklyn I was not aware – in Paris as it happens – that King was at that moment in jail in Birmingham, Alabama. I learned it only last week. A favourite on-line source, OpEdNews, published in tribute to the man his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail 1963”. I printed a copy to read aloud, at breakfast, as a way of honouring the occasion.

King’s letter, dated April 16^th 1963, is addressed to a group of fellow-clergymen, colleagues who had called his activities against racial segregation “unwise and untimely”. He’d come across their statement “While confined here in the Birmingham city jail” and was moved to try to respond to them in “patient and reasonable terms”. I’d never read the letter before. As a former teacher, now geezer, but still voracious reader, I place a good deal of trust in the sense I get of a person from the way he writes. Reading it was humbling; reading it aloud proved not quite possible without pauses for eye-wiping and throat-clearing.

We all know the sound of King: the rhetorical devices, the “I have a dream” repetitions, the faint pompousness, the drawing of parallels such as between the “dark dungeons of complacency” and the “bright hills of creative protest”, the ringing, prophetic tone and other echoes. These and others are all there in the letter. The reader can hear the man, indeed the reader comes, reading it aloud, almost to sound like the man himself. It can’t be helped.

What I found much more impressive on a cerebral rather than emotional level, was the man’s tolerance, his restraint, his logic and insistence on sticking to first principles. He deals head-on with all the usual criticisms which his fellow clergymen apparently have uttered again. Right at the start, King tackles, as he must, what he calls the argument of “outsiders coming in”. There is no need for him to rehearse all the familiar and predictable phrases about “Yankees” or “foreigners” coming “down here” and “interfering” or “meddling” with things that are “not their business” and “they know nothing about”. We’ve all heard them and know that they powerfully evoke strong feelings. Calmly, King makes the point that he was officially invited to be where he is. He notes that there is injustice in this part of the nation and that “Whatever affects one directly, affect all indirectly,” and he ends by rejecting the notion of “outside agitator” with “Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” For me, part of his wisdom lies in his having written “anyone who lives inside the US” rather than “any citizen of the US”.

King then runs through his fellow preachers’ objections about his engaging in public demonstrations by showing conclusively that he had no choice. Their tut-tutting about law-breaking is subjected to a calmly devastating lesson about the difference between just and unjust laws. Their charge of inciting violence is compared to blaming the victim of robbery for having caused the robbery by his possession of money. Their plea to be patient, to let time cure their ills, he rejects with “the time is always ripe to do right” and their charge of extremism is simply rendered silly by pointing out what real extremism, like that of the Black Muslim movement of the time, is and can be if he is not permitted to allow black people to release their pent up resentments and their frustrations in a more orderly way.

In another of the many strengths of his letter, his width and aptness of reference, King goes on, now on the offensive, to examine his disappointment over the charge of extremism. He gently points out that Christ was an extremist of love, the Biblical prophet Amos an extremist of justice, Paul of Tarsus an extremist of the Christian gospel, John Bunyan an extremist of conscience, Abraham Lincolm an extremist of freedom, Thomas Jefferson an extremist of equality.

Another disappointment of his has been, with notable exceptions, the majority of his colleagues, the church itself, who have been “more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.” Assuring them that his disappointment is a disappointment of love, he cites a contrast between the early Christians, known for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators” and the complacent, ineffectual contemporary church as “archdefender of the status quo.”

King ends his letter – dotted throughout with impressive, easy reference to other thinkers, T.S. Eliot, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Reinhold Niebuhr, Martin Buber, Paul Tillich – by reminding his colleagues again of the sufferings of those in his cause, the bites of police dogs, the beating of young and old, male and female protestors, even the refusal of food by the Birmingham police department. He reasserts his adherence to principles of non-violence, and clarifies the difference between moral and immoral ends and means, and he commends the courage and the self-discipline of his protesting colleagues in the face of great provocation. “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.”

Let me recall that this letter was written forty-five years ago. No friend of organized religion myself, I would yet recommend its being read aloud, on television, on the radio, around family dining tables annually, on Martin Luther King day.