Parting the Waters (131 page)

King assumed a multitude of perspectives, often changing voice from one phrase to the next. He expressed empathy with the lives of millions over eons, and with the life of a particular child at a single moment. He tried to look not only at white preachers through the eyes of Negroes, but also at Negroes through the eyes of white preachers (“The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations…So let him march sometime, let him have his prayer pilgrimages”). To the white preachers, he presented himself variously as a “haunted,” suffering Negro (“What else is there to do when you are alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think strange thoughts, and pray long prayers?”), a pontificator (“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”), a supplicant (“I hope, sirs, you can understand…”), and a fellow bigshot (“If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else”). He spoke also as a teacher: “How does one determine when a law is just or unjust?…To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law…. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality…Let me give another explanation…” And he spoke as a gracious fellow student, seeking common ground: “You are exactly right in your call for negotiation…I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue.”

By degrees, King established a kind of universal voice, beyond time, beyond race. As both humble prisoner and mighty prophet, as father, harried traveler, and cornered leader, he projected a character of nearly unassailable breadth. When he reached the heart of his case, he adopted an authentic tone of intimacy toward the very targets of his wrath—toward men who had condemned him without mentioning his name. Almost whispering on the page, he presented his most scathing accusations as a confession:

Back at the Gaston Motel, deciphering what he called King's “chicken-scratch handwriting,” Wyatt Walker became visibly excited by these passages. “His cup has really run over with those white preachers!” Walker exclaimed. Long frustrated by what seemed to him King's excessive forbearance, Walker thrilled to see such stinging wrath let loose. He knew that the history of the early Christian church made jail the appropriate setting for spiritual judgments—that buried within most religious Americans was an inchoate belief in persecuted spirituality as the natural price of their faith. Here was the early church reincarnate, with King rebuking the empire for its hatred, for its fearful defense of worldly attachments. For this, Walker put aside his clipboard. Long into the night, he dictated King's words to his secretary for typing.

 

King was aiming at a tender spot in political and religious culture. The church had been central to Negro politics since 1441, when Prince Henry the Navigator brought the first recorded slaves out of sub-Sahara Africa and presented all ten of them as a gift to Pope Eugenius IV. Four hundred years later, the two largest Protestant churches in America divided not on some scholastic twist of theology—though there were plenty of these, too—but pointedly over the personal respect due two slaveholding preachers from Georgia. When Northerners raised doubts about their Christian fitness, Southern Baptists and Methodists indignantly marched out to form their own sectional churches. All through the 1840s and 1850s, the eminent Rev. C. C. Jones of Savannah labored to stave off a parallel schism within the Presbyterian Church. Haunted by the personal implications of slavery (“How often do I think of the number of hands employed to furnish me with the conveniences of life,” he had written in the 1820s, “of which they are in consequence deprived—how many intellects, how many souls perhaps, withered and blasted forever for this very purpose!”), he had dedicated his life to the controversial proposition that the first duty of Christians was to extend the benefits of religion to Negroes. Having convinced himself that “the salvation of one soul will more than outweigh all the pain and woe of their capture and transportation, and subsequent residence among us,” Jones expanded a slave mission from the Puritan congregation at Dorchester. He nurtured the Negro church in infancy, only to be blasted himself by some of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass' most withering oratory. “Oh, the artful dodger!” cried Douglass. “Well may the thief be glad, the robber sing, and the adulterer clap his hands for joy.” Boring in against Jones's trademark distinction between the evil system and the conscientious, Christian slaveholder, Douglass insisted that slavery existed only because it was respectable, and that it was respectable because men such as Jones were wrongly accorded the gentlemanly respect due Christians. Jones came to defend his life's mission with embittered contempt, calling abolitionists “fanatics of the worse sort, setting at defiance all laws human and divine.” When the Southern Presbyterians finally split away during the Civil War, Jones urged the church to adopt the religious instruction of slaves as a high calling.

A century later, religious respectability remained the crux of the issue that incensed King as he wrote Jones's great-grandson and namesake, Bishop C. C. Jones Carpenter. As instigator and first signatory, Carpenter had hand-carried the clerical letter attacking the Negro demonstrations to the Birmingham newspapers, exercising great care against interception or editorial changes. Explosive racial tension added gravity to every word, all the more so because of Carpenter's reputation as the senior Episcopal bishop in the United States. He was a sophisticated critic of segregation and a lifelong correspondent of Reinhold Niebuhr's best friend, Bishop Will Scarlett, who regularly pleaded with Carpenter to hurl his immense prestige against segregation.
*
However, Carpenter needed to pick only the slightest difference with King in program or emphasis to stand aside, leaving the weight of his reputation to fall against the movement. King sought a revolution to reverse the burden of inertia. Carpenter chided King on the grounds that protest lacked Christian respectability, unaware of the countervailing storm within King against the Christian respectability of clergymen such as Carpenter himself.

 

“I need more paper,” King told Clarence Jones. Sometimes directly, and sometimes with the clandestine help of an old Negro trusty in the jail, he exchanged the new handwritten original for the typed draft. By then the smuggling relay was exasperating Jones, for whom the letter was a toothless appeal to white clergymen who did not matter. But he saw the letter-writing as a mental health exercise for King. “I figured he was entitled to it—you know, a man in jail,” Jones later recalled. “But Lord have mercy, I thought he had lost his perspective.” Among the few business decisions Jones managed to wrest from King was an order to evict Hosea Williams from the Gaston Motel. Williams had responded to King's request for help by driving over from Savannah with a carload of assistants, who were running up a motel bill on the SCLC's tab. Walker found this not only expensive but unseemly, as the outside staff people far outnumbered the Birmingham volunteers going to jail every day. King agreed.

The two confessions filled the second half of what turned out to be a twenty-page letter. At first King formally denounced the white preachers for their shortcomings, as though speaking from a pulpit. “I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshippers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the
law
,” he wrote, “but I have longed to hear white ministers say, ‘follow this decree because integration is morally
right
and the Negro is your brother.'” As he continued with his usual themes on the failures of the church, his wrath turned slowly into a lament:” I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love.” In supreme irony, the prisoner in the hole mourned over the most respectable clergymen in Alabama as lost sheep who were unable to find the most obvious tenets of their faith.

“Maybe again, I have been too optimistic,” King added, as though it may have been folly to expect better. “…Maybe I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true
ecclesia
and the hope of the world.” Even if the prelates excluded themselves and all their authority from the cause of justice, King said he would not despair, because for him the inner church was a stream of belief intermingled with the religious core of the American creed. If all men were created equal, then all were brothers and sisters, and these fundamental beliefs tilted history toward the affirming conclusion that the universe was on the side of justice. “We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation,” wrote King, “because the goal of America is freedom…If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”

In this letter, as in his sermons, King pulled back from an initial peroration. Almost as an aside, he mentioned the part of the Carpenter statement that expressed thanks to the Birmingham authorities for downplaying the demonstrations with muffling restraint. “I don't believe you would so quickly commend the policemen if you would observe their ugly and inhuman treatment of Negroes here in the city jail,” King wrote. Conceding that the police had performed with professional discipline in public, King raised the question he thought should have occurred to the white preachers. “But for what purpose?” he asked them, and he answered his own question: “To preserve the evil system of segregation.” For all his nonviolent preaching about how it was wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends, King wrote, “it is just as wrong, or even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.” He quoted T. S. Eliot to that effect.

Then he returned soulfully to his lament. “I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of the most inhuman provocation,” he wrote. “One day the South will recognize its real heroes…One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thusly, carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers.”

Late at night, an exhausted Willie Pearl Mackey literally fell asleep over her typewriter. Failing to revive her, Wyatt Walker lifted his secretary by the arms, placed her in another chair, and sat down at the typewriter himself. Against his sharply defined sense of executive hierarchy, only the rarest emergency could compel the descent into clerical duty, but this time Walker pecked to the end. He could not bear to leave undone so exquisite a blend of New Testament grace and Old Testament wrath. Near his closing, King groped consciously toward the mixture. “If I have said anything in this letter that is an overstatement of the truth and is indicative of an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me,” he wrote to Bishop Carpenter and the others. “If I have said anything in this letter that is an understatement of the truth and is indicative of my having a patience that makes me patient with anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.”

The “Letter from Birmingham Jail” did not spring quickly to acclaim. It remained essentially a private communication for some time, in spite of Wyatt Walker's labors to attract the attention of the passing world. Its Gandhian themes did impress some of James Lawson's contacts, who offered to publish the letter in the June issue of
Friends
, the Quaker journal, but ordinary reporters saw no news in what appeared to be an especially long-winded King sermon. Not a single mention of the letter reached white or Negro news media for a month. In hindsight, it appeared that King had rescued the beleaguered Birmingham movement with his pen, but the reverse was true: unexpected miracles of the Birmingham movement later transformed King's letter from a silent cry of desperate hope to a famous pronouncement of moral triumph.

Wyatt Walker sorely needed a glimpse of this future. In the absence of swelling expectations, his mechanical genius was being ground to bits. For the first time in the decade, physical persecution of King aroused no whirlwind of political pressures. The Kennedy Administration, after responding circumspectly to Coretta's initiatives, preferred to remain silent. Its officials reacted no better than neutrally toward King if pressed, and in private criticized his movement as a nuisance. Four days after King went to jail, Walker tacitly acknowledged that King's name had lost some of its symbolic power. In a letter to Burke Marshall he notified the Justice Department that henceforth the Birmingham campaign “would be channeling the enthusiasms built up into voter registration efforts.” Although Walker casually presented the change as “the second phase of our campaign,” it actually meant scrapping all the solemn resolve to break segregation in Birmingham by concerted direct action. Walker's notice to Marshall anticipated an Albany-style retreat from Birmingham. It also signaled to the Kennedy people that King needed their support badly enough to adopt their preferred methods.