Clayton Hardiman: MLK's ideas almost criminally under appreciated

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on April 19, 2013 at 10:18 AM, updated April 19, 2013 at 10:28 AM
“﻿Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Martin Luther King

I know it is an incongruous thought. But as I sit down before the camera and run my eyes over this text I am about to read, my mind wings back over nearly four decades of newspaper writing. I am trying to remember how many prison letters I received in that time.

One hundred, maybe? One hundred fifty?

Every month or few, one of those letters would find its way onto my desk. Some were as formal as legal documents. Other were achingly personal. But even the formal ones betrayed the writer’s passion. Most were fat and exhaustive. Their envelopes bulged with names, dates, trial transcripts and presumed court errors.

I tried to read them all.

Virtually every last one was a variation on a theme: Get me out of here.

And why not? I can’t say for sure why these letters were written to me, but I think it was about justice. And if you’re spending an eternity in a prison cell, if you’re locked away where you’re convinced you don’t belong, from a personal point of view, what greater injustice can there be?

So, I became a prison block fantasy. I became a character in that movie, that novel, that stereotypical television episode where the tireless reporter digs up the exonerating evidence that sets the convict free. It probably never occurred to them that as an employee for a midsize daily newspaper, I had no time to go chasing after the ghosts of felony convictions past.

Which is just one of the things that makes the text in my hands so atypical, so singular and so remarkable. Not once in this letter, written half a century ago in a Birmingham, Ala., jail cell, does the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. cry out for his own release.

Instead, he comes perilously close to arguing that in a society infected with unjust laws, a jail cell is exactly where a person of conscience belongs.

King was serving a jail term for his part in a campaign of nonviolent marches and sit-ins when he began writing his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.” It was a response to a group of white Alabama clergymen who not only had criticized King and his methods but praised the Birmingham police for their restraint.

These were the same authorities who a short time later would shock a national television audience by turning police dogs and fire hoses on nonviolent civil rights demonstrators.

Denied writing materials, King began writing his response in the margins of the newspaper in which he read their statement. He continued it on scraps of paper smuggled into his cell by a friendly black trusty.

He argued against the criticism of his campaign as “unwise and untimely.” He argued against their insistence that the campaign should be fought solely in the courts and not in the streets. He argued against their categorization of him and others as outsiders.


King’s critics called him an extremist, and at first King’s hackles rose. But then he noted that Amos, Jesus, Jefferson and Lincoln were extremists. “... The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists will we be," he wrote. “... Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?"

For all the lip service we do King’s memory, his ideas are almost criminally under appreciated. Unless a paragraph begins with the words “I have a dream," we bury it in the stack.

That’s why Hackley Public Library deserves our gratitude, along with all the other libraries, churches, synagogues and coffee shops that celebrated the 50th anniversary of this letter this week with public readings across the country.

Here is a text that is neither comforting nor comfortable. To this day, it indicts us as well as challenges us. But it needs remembering and always will -- as long as there is tension between just ideals and unjust laws, between groups eager for change and groups comfortable with the status quo.

It places King firmly within the tradition of the conscience-driven prison letter -- right alongside Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Apostle Paul, George Jackson and Ibn Taymiyyah.

I wonder about that sometimes -- whether there is something in the dynamic of confinement that drives one to liberate the mind. I wonder if there is some magical mystery element in three solid walls and a fourth of iron bars that causes one person to find his or her purpose while another loses his or her grip.

Clayton Hardiman is a Chronicle columnist. Email: