Finding crucial message in King’s ‘Letter’

In many churches this weekend, religious leaders will extol the life and legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in anticipation of Monday’s federal holiday in his honor.

Some will quote from his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. Others will invoke a letter he wrote while in an Alabama jail four months earlier.

Though not as well known, King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” -- a response to eight white clergymen’s public misgivings about outsiders protesting in Alabama -- remains a fount of inspiration for clergy and students of the civil rights movement.

“This letter is not a letter just to white churches -- it’s a letter to the church,” said the Rev. Ralph Watkins, an African Methodist Episcopal minister who is assistant dean of Fuller Theological Seminary’s African American Church Studies Program. “Amazingly enough, many issues that Dr. King raised in that letter we are still dealing with.”

The civil rights leader wrote the letter in jail after he was arrested for leading a protest march in downtown Birmingham on Good Friday. Addressed to “My Dear Fellow Clergymen,” the letter was released to the public two days after Easter.

In it, King, at the time president of the Atlanta-headquartered Southern Christian Leadership Conference, explained why protesters had converged on the Alabama city.

“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the 8th century BC left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.”

(King was referring to Paul’s vision of a man from Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help.”).

King went on to say that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

He chided his clergy critics for “deploring” the demonstrations but not injustice.

“Your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations,” he wrote.

King, a Baptist preacher and a theologian who earned a doctorate from Boston University, was 34 at the time. The letter is full of references to Scripture and great spiritual leaders through the ages.

He said that when his clergy critics called him an “extremist,” he was offended at first but later gained a “measure of satisfaction” from the label.

After all, King said, Jesus, the prophet Amos, the Apostle Paul, German reformer Martin Luther and Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson were extremists too.

“Was not Jesus an extremist for love,” King wrote, citing his command, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”

“Was not Amos an extremist for justice,” King went on, quoting from the Book of Amos, “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

The question, King said, is not “whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.”

King reserved his harshest evaluation for the white church and its leadership. When he was catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Ala., he thought the ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would become “our strongest allies,” he wrote.

“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.

“So here we are moving toward the exit of the 20th century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a tail-light behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice.

“I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other Southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: ‘What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?’ ”

King added that many churches had made “strange, un-biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.”

The Rev. Frank Portee III, pastor of the Church of the Good Shepherd, a United Methodist Church in Willingboro, N.J., said King’s message still rings true today. “Most preachers today have become super spiritual to the neglect of the hard challenges that face the human context,” said Portee, who until June was pastor of the Church of the Redeemer in South Los Angeles and convened an annual national conference for African American pastors and lay leaders.

“King sought to bridge that gulf between the social and spiritual. That was the genius of his prophetic leadership.”

Though Portee was in grade school when King was living, he cherishes the letter as a prophetic message.

“It’s an important historical marker in world history,” he said. “The church has to be the one to challenge our psychic captivity to amnesia.”

King was not popular, Portee said, because he made so many people uncomfortable. But that, he said, is precisely what a religious institution is sometimes called to do.

“The church always has to take a stance for justice and righteousness. That means we have to challenge families, young people and adults, to rise up to what God is calling us to be,” he said.

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‘Long prayers’

King, who began writing his famous letter on strips of paper slipped to him in jail, apologized for its length: “I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing it 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?”

The King Center in Atlanta has the entire text, as well as audio of him reading excerpts, at thekingcenter.org. Click on “site map.” The letter is under “Programs and Services.”