Arrested on April 12, 1963, during an epic struggle to desegregate Birmingham, Ala., King was in jail when he read the statement of eight white moderate clergymen who criticized the demonstrations as “untimely,” branded King “extreme” and chided the protesters for precipitating violence.
King’s letter, written on scraps of paper smuggled out of the jail and first made public on April 16, 1963, began as irate jottings of rebuttal. In its final form, though, the indignation was not evident in every sentence: the opening words, “My dear fellow clergymen,” brimmed with precious gentility.Later, King offered reasoned justifications for civil disobedience and rarefied nods to the theologians Martin Buber and Paul Tillich. And he evoked universalism with the proclamation, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Yet black anger, not fancy philosophy, was the driving force behind the letter. You don’t have to be a literary critic to sense the cold fury: “For years now, I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity.”
In a line worthy of Malcolm X decrying white “tricknology,” King savaged what he saw as white mendacity: “This ‘Wait!’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ ” His target was not the Ku Klux Klan, but a vast majority of “moderate” Americans, including the Kennedy administration, who had urged him to postpone the protests. Presumably, they meant never, too. Hardly naïve about the power of moral appeal to stir the white conscience, King flirted with the idea that whites were virtually incapable of empathizing with the black plight. “I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans or passionate yearnings of the oppressed race.”
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