King’s words still relevant today

If judged by just the first few paragraphs, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” seems an odd text to be taught so widely in classrooms across the country.

“My Dear Fellow Clergymen,” it begins, though which clergymen he refers to is not made clear in the confines of the letter. Throughout, King references events that he likewise has no time to fully explain.

Just to get some of that context out of the way: King wrote the letter, while, in his words, “alone in a narrow jail cell” after having marched through Birmingham into a waiting police wagon in an effort to energize a campaign against segregation in Alabama’s largest city. He was responding to a letter white clergymen had published that characterized King’s movement as impatient and extremist.

King began writing the letter in the margins of the newspaper in which the clergymen’s letter was published, continued it on scraps of paper he got from other prisoners and finished it on a legal pad his lawyer was finally able to provide him.

And while the first page or so might be tough going without a full understanding of that context, it quickly becomes clear just why it is that this text is so widely read in America today.

In less than 7,000 words, King lays out the framework for the Civil Rights Movement, starting with why he was in Alabama in the first place.

“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here,” he wrote. “I am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town.”

He goes on to detail the goals of nonviolent resistance:

“It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it cannot be ignored.”

The letter reaches its crescendo with an extraordinarily powerful and extremely long sentence explaining why King feels the movement cannot, as the white clergy urged, be patient, why justice can’t wait.

“But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society,” King begins the sentence, before adding injustice after injustice to the list and concluding, “then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

It’s easy to see all of this as a history lesson, to read King’s words and take from them only some vague sense of what it must have been like to live 50 years ago.

But aren’t we still grappling with what it means to be an affluent society in which too many are left “smothering in an airtight cage of poverty?”

Between the protests in Ferguson, Mo., and New York City over police officers’ use of deadly force against unarmed black people, can you recall a recent period in which race was more prominently a part of our national discourse?

King’s words are as relevant today as they were in April 1963, when he wrote them from that narrow jail cell.

We were inspired anew by King’s reclamation of the word “extremist” in his letter. He says while he was at first disappointed by the characterization, he gradually began to see it in a different light.

“Was not Jesus an extremist for love: ‘love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’”

We agree with King’s conclusion that it is the extremist’s motivations that count: love, or hate?

“The question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremist we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?” King wrote.

The world is rife with examples of extremists like the killers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre. We need more examples of men like King who are extremists for love and equality. We need more women and men who light candles instead of curse the darkness.