Martin Luther King's Powerful Defense of Identity Politics From Birmingham Jail

The goal of identity politics, King wrote in 1963, was through suffering to more easily recognize and identify with others similarly oppressed.

Nicolaus Mills
01.21.19 12:29 AM ET

No single piece of writing that Martin Luther King Jr. published in the ’60s had more of an impact than his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” but this year, as we mark the holiday celebrating King’s birthday, the moment is right for a second look at that letter: this time for what it says about the issue that beyond any other continues to divide progressives—identity politics.

King without his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is Lincoln without the Gettysburg Address, but when it was completed in April 1963, the letter met a cool reception. The historians Taylor Branch, Diane McWhorter, and Timothy Noah have all shown how “Letter from Birmingham Jail” received no widespread national circulation until The Atlantic published it months later in its August 1963 issue under the cringe-worthy title, “The Negro Is Your Brother.”

The genesis of King’s letter was his April 12 arrest, along with civil rights leaders Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth, for leading a Good Friday protest in Birmingham, Alabama, as part of a campaign to bring national attention to Birmingham’s segregationist policies and brutal policing of its African-American community. While King was in jail, a friend smuggled him a copy of the Birmingham News, which featured an open letter by eight Alabama Christian and Jewish clergymen criticizing King for his role in the demonstrations.

King’s response to the open letter was a letter of his own addressed to “My Dear Fellow Clergymen.” In his letter, which he composed in his cell before being released from jail on April 20, King never accused the clergy attacking him of being insincere or racist. Instead, he linked them to the kind of white moderate who, in King’s judgment, was “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.” From his position of comfort, King declared, the white moderate “paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”

“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait,’” King observed. Here in a single sentence was the crux of his argument, and had he ended his letter at this point, King’s defense of what we now call identity politics would have been formidable. But King was not through. The positive side of his argument for protesting in Birmingham was more important than the negative side.

more
https://www.thedailybeast.com/martin-luther-kings-powerful-defense-of-identity-politics-from-birmingham-jail?ref=home