By: Tony Williams
Most
everyone knows Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which I wrote
about here on its fiftieth anniversary last August. The March on Washington and King’s famous speech had a
singular impact upon the Civil Rights Movement and passage of the Civil Rights
Act. The “I Have a Dream” speech
was profoundly shaped by American founding constitutional principles.
As
important and brilliant as the “I Have a Dream” speech was, the lesser-known
“Letter from Birmingham Jail” was perhaps an even more profound examination of
the principles of constitutionalism and justice.
In
early 1963, King and the movement were faltering after a failed campaign in
Albany, GA, to raise awareness of the injustice of segregation. The leaders of the movement decided
strategically to make Birmingham, AL, a showcase of injustice with the reaction
of a virulently racist police chief.
Mass
demonstrations and arrests soon followed.
Pretty soon, the infamous police dogs and fire hoses were loosed upon
the demonstrators. King, himself,
marched in defiance of the local authorities and shared a prison cell with his
fellow marchers. King proceeded to
pen a letter explaining his breaking of the law banning the demonstrators from
marching as well as explain to the white ministers who opposed his direct
action campaign why he could not follow their counsel to “wait” for justice.
“Letter
from Birmingham Jail” is a logical and philosophical masterpiece of persuasive
writing and is profoundly rooted in the traditions and thinkers of Western
civilization. King writes that
blacks “have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and
God-given rights.” He starts by
appealing to the pathos of the readers recounting many terrible injustices
suffered by southern blacks from the “stinging darts of segregation.”
King
addressed the fact that people were legitimately concerned that King and other
leaders were breaking the law “since we so diligently urge people to obey the
Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools [Brown v. Board of Education].
How can King advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? His answer is that “there fire two
types of laws: just and unjust.”
King is a firm advocate of the moral responsibility of obeying just laws
for order in civil society.
However, he argues that, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey
unjust laws.” He then quotes the great Christian
authority, St. Augustine, that “an unjust law is no law at all.”
Like
a good philosopher King sets about defining his terms “just” and “unjust” to
prove his case about following them.
A just law, King writes, is a “man-made code that squares with the moral
law or the law of God.” The unjust
is “out of harmony with the moral law.”
King assumes, like the Founding Fathers, that there was a natural law of
right and wrong given to humans by the Creator. For support for this natural law philosophy, King refers to
the great Christian philosopher of the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas, who
held that an unjust law is “’a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and
natural law.’”
King
provides further elaboration by positing that just laws uplift the human person
while unjust laws “distort the soul.”
Just laws are rooted in human equality as in the words of the
Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal”), while unjust laws give a false sense of superiority
and inferiority. King uses the
terminology of the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, arguing that unjust laws
are based upon an “I-It” relationship rather than an “I-Thou,” treating people
as things rather than persons with dignity. In language that might seem out of place in today’s
politics, King went so far as to say that segregation was not only
“politically, economically, and sociologically unsound; it is morally wrong and
awful.” Indeed, he writes that
segregation is an example of man’s “terrible sinfulness.” Finally, the unjust segregation laws
were inflicted upon a minority with no vote in creating the laws and thereby
passed without consent, violating American principles of republican
self-government. He quotes from
St. Paul, Martin Luther, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln to support the
ideal of justice.
King
rejects the argument that his belief in breaking unjust laws would lead to
anarchy. “One who breaks an unjust
law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty,”
he writes. “I
submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust
and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the
conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the
highest respect for law.” He
refers to other examples of those who were persecuted for disobeying the laws
of the state including Socrates, Jesus, the Christian martyrs, and the members
of the Boston Tea Party.
Martin
Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was a document that argued for justice
deeply rooted in the Western and American traditions. King agrees with James Madison, who wrote in Federalist #51 that, “Justice is the end
of government. It is the end of
civil society. It ever has been
and ever will be pursued until it be obtained.” In a state where the strong majority oppressed the weak
minority, “anarchy may as truly be said to reign.”
King
anchored the Civil Rights movement in American principles of liberty and
self-government. “One day,” King
wrote, the world will note that the Civil Rights demonstrators were “standing
up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our
Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells
of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation
of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”
__________________________________________
Tony Williams is the Program Director
of the WJMI and the author of four books including America’s Beginnings: The Dramatic
Events that Shaped a Nation’s Character.
1 comment:
Reading this helped make my celebration of Martin Luther King Day even more meaningful. Many thanks.
Post a Comment