Introduction

Birmingham, Alabama was the scene of perhaps the most significant campaign of the Civil Rights Movement, not least because it catapulted Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had been invited to Birmingham, one of the nation’s most segregated cities, by the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, whose own efforts to negotiate desegregation with the city’s business leaders and government officials had failed. In the spring of 1963, King and the SCLC carefully orchestrated a program of nonviolent demonstrations and sit-ins, targeting downtown businesses and white churches, hoping to gain national public attention and sympathy, and eventually federal intervention, should their direct action produce a violent counter-reaction from the authorities—as indeed it did. On April 10, 1963, the city issued an injunction barring the demonstrations, which King and the demonstrators ignored: nonviolent resistance now included direct civil disobedience. On April 12, King was among the 50 people arrested and jailed for defying the city’s injunction.

The next day, a group of eight moderate white Alabama clergymen published this open letter, criticizing the confrontational demonstrations (and King, though not by name) and calling instead for negotiations (a new, less combative mayor was just taking office). (The group had earlier that year published “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense,” which urged the use of the courts to correct bad laws and called for obedience to the laws until they are legally overturned.) The next day, King answered “A Call for Unity” with his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

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Why do the clergymen regard the demonstrations as “unwise and untimely”? Why do they object to the involvement of “outsiders” (a clear reference to King and the SCLC) in the affairs of their city? What do they mean by calling the demonstrations “extreme measures”? What are they worried about for their city? What do they mean by “actions as incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be”? Granting the clergymen the benefit of any doubts regarding the decency of their motives, and imagining yourself as a contemporary reader of their “call to unity,” what can you say in favor of their position? Before reading King’s critical response to the clergyman, try formulating your own rebuttal.

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