Introduction
Martin Luther King was a Ph.D. in theology who had led the civil rights movement in the South since 1955. He referred to the founding documents and principles of the United States that promised liberty and equality for all, and noted that the country had failed to fulfill these in practice, especially because blacks had suffered centuries of slavery and segregation. His main concern was to secure basic citizenship and voting rights for blacks, and his speaking style was far more like that of a preacher and prophet. A century after slavery was abolished, blacks still faced segregation, discrimination and lack of voting right in many parts of the United States, not only the South. Of course, racism was far more overt there and the civil rights movement had been very successful in exposing it for the world to see, through protests, marches and sit-ins. His central theme was that the nation had to keep the promises made in its founding documents and that “there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights” (King 1963).
King was very much influenced by the Christian Realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, since he believed that humanity was in a fallen state due to original sin and that liberal optimism about perfecting the world or creating the Kingdom of God on earth was a false hope. For this reason, he was not a pacifist and supported the United States in World War II and the Cold War, on the basis that the American empire was the lesser of two evils. Realists like George Kennan called him “the father of us all”, while King praised Neibuhr as one of his most important teachers (Patton 1977). As a tough-minded, pragmatic liberal, he strongly condemned Christians who refused to face the great moral, political and economic crises of the 20th Century, and also argued that the morality of the Sermon on the Mount was “not practical in human society” because doing evil was inevitable in a fallen and sinful world (Paulishek 55). King combined the nonviolent methods of Gandhi with the Christian Realism of Niebuhr from the time he began leading the civil rights movement in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, which led to the desegregation of the city’s buses. He did not resort to violent methods, even when the Ku Klux Klan bombed his house, and refused to carry a gun or hire armed bodyguards for his own protection, despite many threats against his life. King was prepared to give his life for the cause of human rights, and finally did in 1968.
King and Nonviolence: Birmingham Jail and I Have a Dream
For Niebuhr, if not for King, resorting to violence and participating in wars were necessary evils, and sometimes the methods used might be extreme, like carpet bombing cities or using nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As he wrote in Moral Man in Immoral Society, The Nature and Destiny of Man, and The Irony of American History, that Protestant liberalism was too weak and simple in bowing down to modern culture and ideas. The chief heresy in modern society was the same as in all past eras—pride, egoism and the desire to “play God”—and to worship the power of science and technology (Patton 1977). Along with J. William Fulbright, he also warned against the hubris and arrogance of power, and that America was also under God’s judgment like any other nation or empire. Martin Luther King wrote a lot about Niebuhr in graduate school and sought his assistance when preparing his doctoral dissertation. He was also critical of liberalism, especially the “false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism”, which he considered well-meaning but ineffectual. He came to doubt the natural goodness of humanity, but also described Gandhi’s nonviolent methods as an effective power strategy for blacks in the U.S., given that they were only 10% of the population and could never hope to win through a violent uprising (Niebuhr Stanford.edu). His criticism of the white clergy and the Southern liberals in general is quite clear in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, which is in fact addressed to the white ministers of that city.
In this letter, Martin Luther King understood very well that the white clergy of the city did not like him and had no real sympathy for him or the cause of black civil rights. They did not want him in the city and hoped only that he would leave, but King appealed to them on moral and ethical grounds, on the premise that they really are people of conscience and goodwill no matter whether this is the case in reality. Among the long-time KKK members was the Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor, who reacted against the civil rights marches with police dogs, beatings and water cannons and imprisoning so many people that the jails were full. As King stated in the letter, he even postponed the protests until after the election in hopes that Connor would be defeated, which he was. Even so, Connor and the old administration refused to leave office, and had finally had King arrested and locked up in the city jail. He had just spent a considerable amount of time in Albany, Georgia, organizing the protests there against segregation, and even though he had been imprisoned there the campaign was not particularly successful. His real goal in Birmingham was to show the entire nation the true conditions that blacks had to endure in the Jim Crow South, in hopes that Congress would finally pass this Civil Rights Act. He also hoped to encourage the administration of John F. Kennedy to support this new law, which it had been extremely reluctant to do for fear of offending Southern white voters. King went on to express his deeply-held convictions about Christian nonviolence and social justice, which were a regular theme in all his speeches and writings, and which might even have moved some of the white clergy.
The March on Washington and the Civil Rights Act
After the protests in Birmingham led to the desegregation of stores and restaurants and more hiring of blacks, King joined other civil rights groups in supporting a March on Washington to demand passage of the Civil Rights Act. His “I Have a Dream” speech of 1963 was delivered at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington before a live audience of over 200,000 and a worldwide television and radio audience of tens of millions. His audience in Washington was overwhelmingly sympathetic to his ethos and leadership, even the young militants in the student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee who did not regard him as militant enough or referred to him snidely as ‘Da Lawd’ because of his preaching style. In the nation as a whole, of course, he had many enemies, and not just whites in the South, and he was the victim of many assassination attempts before he was finally murdered in 1968. Among his many enemies in government and politics the most dangerous was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who was a racist and set up a program that continually attempted to harass and intimidate him. Even though his birthday is now a federal holiday, King was a much-hated figure in the 1960s as well as a beloved and popular one, especially by those who feared or felt threatened by his demand for radical change in American society.
King was the most visible leader of the American civil rights movement in 1955-68 and had participated in many nonviolent protests. With his PhD in theology, he could have had a comfortable, middle class life as the pastor of a major church, had he not chosen to participate in these struggles for justice and equality. A year after this speech, he received the Nobel Peace Prize. King spoke very clearly about unity over divisiveness and expressed faith that the United States could change. Many whites were attending the March on Washington and participating in the civil rights movement so they should not all be considered on the same level as the Southern police, politicians and Ku Klux Klan members who were violently opposed to voting rights and civil rights for blacks. He knew from personal experience that many people in the audience had come from “jail cells”, and so had he, most recently during the Birmingham protests. King had also experienced the “storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality” many times, and had also had his house blown up by the Ku Klux Klan (King 1963).
Conclusion
As far as the ideals and principles that King expressed, no real counter-arguments are possible, since they were indeed based on the founding documents of the United States, no matter that these were honored more in the breach than in reality. This is still the case today. Perhaps the main fault with King’s speech is too good, too idealistic, in that it set up expectations that could never be fulfilled by a society like this one, and probably not any other on earth. In other words, it was utopian rather than realistic, but the civil rights movement was in the middle of a life and death struggle and it needed words of inspiration. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was one of the greatest delivered by any 20th Century American, and the phrase came to sum up his entire life and career. Because of the nonviolent protests in the South and the March on Washington, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed, which finally ended the system of dual public schools in the Southern states and abolished Jim Crow segregation is hospitals, transportation and public facilities. Only the 1965 Voting Rights Act was of equal importance, and no legislation since that time has had as much of an effect on politics, economics and society in America. In the end, he was successful in beginning the process of desegregation in Birmingham, although the Klan came very close to assassinating him there. In 1965, King would be in Selma, Alabama, organizing the marches and protests for voting which, which again provoked a very harsh police response that was seen on national television. This led to the passage of the 1965 Voting Right Act. Later, King became outspoken in his opposition to the Vietnam War, and at the time of his assassination in Memphis in 1968 was preparing to lead a Poor People’s March on Washington.
WORKS CITED
King, Martin Luther. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, April 16, 1963.
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/resources/article/annotated_letter_from_birmingham
King, Martin Luther. “I Have a Dream” in Sylvan Barnet and Hugo Bedau (eds). Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: A Brief Guide to Argument. Bedford/St. Martin’s 2010: 541-44.
King, Martin Luther. “Where Do We Go from Here?”, 1967
http://www.famous-speeches-and-speech-topics.info/martin-luther-king-speeches/martin-luther-king-speech-where-do-we-go-from-here.htm
Niebuhr, Reinhold (1892-1971). Martin Luther King and the Global Freedom Struggle.
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_niebuhr_reinhold_1892_1971/
Reinhold Niebuhr: Sin & Power.
http://www.redeemerluth.com/other/MLK-4.pdf
Paulishek, K. “Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism, and Just War Theory”, 2007: 53-72.
http://www.eppc.org/docLib/20080205_palpatterson03.pdf
Patton, H. G. Reinhold Niebuhr. Religion Online, 1977.
http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=3279&C=2735
