The Churches and the Civil Rights Movement

In the spring of 1963 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose president was the minister Martin Luther King Jr, came to Birmingham, Alabama at the invitation of its local affiliate, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail p. 1). The president of that body was the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967), Douglas, dissenting, paragraph 60). On 10 April a state court forbade the leaders of the campaign to hold marches without a city permit (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967), opinion of the Court, paragraphs 1–5). On Good Friday, 12 April, King, Ralph Abernathy and Shuttlesworth led about fifty people out of a church toward city hall. The police stopped them after a few blocks and jailed the three leaders (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967), Brennan, dissenting, paragraph 77).

A statement dated the same day came from eight white religious leaders of Alabama: Episcopal, Methodist and Catholic bishops, a Presbyterian moderator, a Baptist pastor and a rabbi (Statement by Alabama Clergymen (12 April 1963), signatures). They called the demonstrations “unwise and untimely” and led in part by outsiders, praised the police for their calm, and urged the Black community to withdraw its support. Rights that were denied, they wrote, should be pressed in the courts and in negotiation, not in the streets (Statement by Alabama Clergymen (12 April 1963), paragraphs 1–7).

King’s reply, dated 16 April from the city jail, is addressed to his “fellow clergymen”. He was in Birmingham, he wrote, because he had been invited and because injustice was there, as the prophets and the apostle Paul had carried their message beyond their home towns (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail p. 1). For years he had heard the word “Wait”, and it had almost always meant “Never” (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail p. 3). He distinguished just laws from unjust ones, appealing to Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail pp. 3–4). Whoever breaks an unjust law, he said, must do it openly, lovingly and ready to accept the penalty, as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and the early Christians had done (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail p. 4) (Daniel 3:16–18).

He then made two confessions. He was gravely disappointed with the white moderate, who preferred order to justice (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail p. 5), and with the white church and its leadership. He had expected the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South to be allies; some had been opponents, and too many had kept silent. He granted exceptions, among them the Reverend Earl Stallings, who had welcomed Black worshippers to his service the previous Sunday (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail p. 7) and who was one of the eight signers (Statement by Alabama Clergymen (12 April 1963), signatures). The early church, he wrote, had changed the society around it; if the church of his day did not recover that spirit it would be dismissed as an “irrelevant social club” (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail p. 8). He credited the Black church with making nonviolence part of the struggle (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail p. 6).

Clergy thus stood on both sides of the exchange. The printed programme of the March on Washington on 28 August 1963, which lists King among the speakers at the Lincoln Memorial, gives the invocation to Patrick O’Boyle, archbishop of Washington, remarks to an officer of the National Council of Churches, and a prayer and remarks to two rabbis (March on Washington, Lincoln Memorial Program (28 August 1963), items 2, 4, 10, 15, 16). In 1967 the Supreme Court upheld the sentences of five days in jail imposed on the ministers for defying the injunction (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967), opinion of the Court, paragraph 9 and judgment), King among them (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967), Brennan, dissenting, paragraph 77). In 1969 it reversed Shuttlesworth’s separate conviction for the Good Friday march (Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham, 394 U.S. 147 (1969), paragraphs 2–7 and judgment).