On April 12, 1963, in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. held a press conference after being served a state court injunction prohibiting civil rights demonstrations. It was, Dr. King said, “raw tyranny under the guise of maintaining law and order.”
Soon, another problem arose: Dr. King’s bail bondsman had run out of money. If they demonstrated, he and his followers would not only be arrested, but have to stay in jail. They demonstrated, and Dr. King was arrested (for the 13th time). While imprisoned, he saw a statement in the Birmingham News that criticized the protests as “unwise and untimely.” It was signed by eight white local clergymen.
Behind bars with time to spare, Dr. King wrote a response – his “Letter From Birmingham Jail” – to the men he addressed as “My Dear Fellow Clergymen.” In addition to Jesus, the prophets and Saint Paul, he referenced Martin Luther, John Bunyan and the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. He cited the Protestant theologians Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr when he wrote about sin and oppression. Analyzing the difference between just and unjust laws, he invoked Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Segregation, Dr. King argued, creates a false sense of inferiority in the segregated and a false sense of superiority in the oppressors. It “distorts the soul and damages the personality.”
A couple of years later, another civil rights activist – one with a more complicated relationship to the church – dramatically emphasized that same point.
James Baldwin, who had been a youth preacher at a Pentecostal church in Harlem, was a gay man who became disillusioned with organized religion. Nonetheless, he was profoundly influenced by Christianity, including the faith of his mother.
In his book “The Fire Is Upon Us,” Nicholas Buccola writes that Baldwin struggled with questions of faith all his life, but he always thought of his mother as “a true Christian, in the best sense possible.” Baldwin recalled that she lived and she wanted her children to live by the golden rule, and she taught “that people have to be loved for their faults as well as their virtues, their ugliness as well as their beauty.”
An echo of his mother’s faith surfaced when Baldwin debated the conservative leader William F. Buckley in 1965. The topic was “the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro.” The spiritually conflicted Baldwin expressed an arguably spiritual point of view by claiming segregation could be even more harmful to oppressors, who are given to feel superior, than to those they persecute.
In the weeks preceding the debate, newspapers had published photos of an Alabama sheriff named Jim Clark assaulting a Black woman who was trying to register to vote. In another incident, he punched a man so hard he broke his own hand.
At the debate, Baldwin said neither Sheriff Clark, nor anyone else, can be dismissed as “a total monster.” He said he was sure the sheriff loves his family and his children. (He couldn’t resist jokingly adding he was sure the sheriff also likes to get drunk.) Sheriff Clark and others used clubs and cattle prods on demonstrators, but Baldwin asserted that the sheriff is “visibly a man like me.”
“Something must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breast, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly,” Baldwin said. “What happens to the man who does it is, in some ways, much, much worse.”
If alive today, Baldwin would no doubt be appalled at the extremes of the government’s mass deportation effort and what the U.S. bishops call “the vilification of immigrants.” He might be even more upset about the corrosive psychological effects on American citizens if they become indifferent to such injustice and cruelty.
On the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation – the year before the imprisoned Dr. King responded to his fellow ministers – Baldwin wrote a letter to his 14-year-old nephew, telling him never to accept society’s view that Black people are inferior to white people. But he cautioned against resentment and hatred toward those who believe themselves superior, insisting, “You must accept them and accept them with love.”
He included an inspiring – and patriotic – thought that is compatible with Dr. Martin Luther King’s sophisticated theology and his own mother’s pious faith. Integration, Baldwin wrote, means “we, with love,” will force “our brothers” to accept the reality of equality. “Great men have done great things here, and will again,” he added, “and we can make America what America must become.”
Carl Peters is former managing editor of the Catholic Star Herald.
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