Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham,’ discussed in Morristown

By Marie Pfeifer

Was Martin Luther King Jr. an extremist?

The adult education group of Morristown’s Presbyterian Church tackled that one on Sunday, along with the role of the moderate white clergy in the civil rights movement.

In King’s famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail,  written to eight members of the white clergy in Birmingham, Ala., he addressed the accusation of extremism and his disappointment with the white moderates. The letter was never sent.

King chose Birmingham for his non-violent demonstrations because it was “the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.”

His letter states that he felt that he was standing between 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.”

The violence, of course, escalated by the expression of the various black nationalist groups that sprang up across the nation. Their cause was fueled by people who lost faith in America and concluded that “the white man was an incorrigible ‘devil.’”

The Southern white Ku Klux Klan (KKK) was an integral part of that violence when it bombed the Byzantine-style 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing four young girls – Cynthia Wesler, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, all 14 years old, and 11-year-old Denise McNair. After that, many more people died for the civil rights movement.

Because King was a peace-loving man who believed in God and loved his Church, he believed in negotiation. He and other black leaders did approach Birmingham’s city fathers to negotiate. They continually refused.

“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 national community,” King wrote.

When the city fathers of Birmingham approved police use of dogs and fire hoses to break up King’s peaceful demonstrations that were televised on national TV, some people proved they were the incorrigible white devils that blacks perceived them to be.

King’s disappointment in the church overwhelmed him. “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.”

He felt the church as a whole did not come to the aid of justice. His love of justice prompted him to break unjust, morally wrong laws that were governing black people. He vowed that his people would reach their goal of freedom in Birmingham even though their motives, at the time, were misunderstood, “because the goal of America is freedom.”