April 16, 1963: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proves that the pen is mightier than the sword -- or the billy club.
Birmingham, the largest city in the State of Alabama, was known for its intense racial segregation, and for its equally intense opposition to those who wished to end it. On April 3, 1963, Dr. King began his "Birmingham campaign," a nonviolent effort coordinated by his group, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR).
On April 10, a judge issued a blanket injunction against "parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing." Leaders of the campaign announced they would disobey the ruling. On April 12, King was arrested with SCLC activist Ralph Abernathy, ACMHR and SCLC official Fred Shuttlesworth, and other marchers, while thousands of African Americans dressed for Good Friday looked on.
King was met with unusually harsh conditions in the Birmingham City Jail. An ally smuggled in a newspaper from April 12, which contained "A Call for Unity," a statement by 8 white Alabama clergymen against King and his methods. The letter provoked King, and he began to write a response to the newspaper itself. King writes in Why We Can't Wait: "Begun on the margins of the newspaper in which the statement appeared while I was in jail, the letter was continued on scraps of writing paper supplied by a friendly Black trusty, and concluded on a pad my attorneys were eventually permitted to leave me."
Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, who had worked his entire career to get black autoworkers the same working conditions as white ones, arranged $160,000 to bail out King and the other jailed protestors.
King's response was April 16, 1963, responded to several criticisms made by the "A Call for Unity" clergymen, who agreed that social injustices existed but argued that the battle against racial segregation should be fought solely in the courts, not the streets. He also criticizes the claim that African Americans should wait patiently while these battles are fought in the courts.
As a minister, King responded to the criticisms on religious grounds. As an activist challenging an entrenched social system, he argued on legal, political, and historical grounds. As an African American, he spoke of the country's oppression of Black people, including himself. As an orator, he used many persuasive techniques to reach the hearts and minds of his audience. Altogether, King's letter was a powerful defense of the motivations, tactics, and goals of the Birmingham campaign and the Civil Rights Movement more generally.
"I was invited," he said, by our Birmingham affiliate "because injustice is here" in what is probably the most racially-divided city in the country, with its brutal police, unjust courts, and many "unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches." Referring to his belief that all communities and states were interrelated, King wrote, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
King also warned that if white people successfully rejected his nonviolent activists as rabble-rousing outside agitators, that could encourage millions of African Americans to "seek solace and security in Black nationalist ideologies, a development that will lead inevitably to a frightening racial nightmare." King was well aware of the efforts along those lines of Malcolm X, a Nation of Islam spokesman in New York.
Citing previous failed negotiations, King wrote that the Black community was left with "no alternative." "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."
The clergymen also disapproved of the timing of public actions. In response, King said that recent decisions by the SCLC to delay its efforts for tactical reasons showed that it was behaving responsibly. He also referred to the broader scope of history, when "'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.'" Declaring that African Americans had waited for the God-given and constitutional rights long enough, King quoted "one of our distinguished jurists" that "Justice too long delayed in justice denied."
Against the clergymen's assertion that demonstrations could be illegal, King argued that civil disobedience was not only justified in the face of unjust laws but also was necessary and even patriotic: "The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'"
Anticipating the claim that one cannot determine such things, he again cited Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas by saying any law not rooted in "eternal law and natural law" is not just, while any law that "uplifts human personality" is just. Segregation undermines human personality, ergo, is unjust. Furthermore, he wrote: "I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."
King stated that it is not morally wrong to disobey a law that pertains to one group of people differently from another. Alabama has used "all sorts of devious methods" to deny its Black citizens their right to vote and thus preserve its unjust laws and broader system of white supremacy. Segregation laws are immoral and unjust "because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority." Even some just laws, such as permit requirements for public marches, are unjust when they are used to uphold an unjust system.
King addressed the accusation that the Civil Rights Movement was "extreme" by first disputing the label but then accepting it. Compared to other movements at the time, King found himself as a moderate. However, in his devotion to his cause, King referred to himself as an extremist. Jesus and other great reformers were extremists: "So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?"
King's discussion of extremism implicitly responded to numerous "moderate" objections to the ongoing movement, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower's claim while he was President that he could not meet with civil rights leaders because doing so would require him to meet with the Ku Klux Klan. There was no such requirement of "equal time."
In the closing, King criticized the clergy's praise of the Birmingham police for maintaining order nonviolently. The recent public displays of nonviolence by the police were in stark contrast to their typical treatment of Black people and, as public relations, helped "to preserve the evil system of segregation." It is wrong to use immoral means to achieve moral ends but also "to use moral means to preserve immoral ends." Instead of the police, King praised the nonviolent demonstrators in Birmingham "for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes."
Extensive excerpts from the letter were published, without King's consent, on May 19, 1963, in the New York Post Sunday Magazine. The complete letter was first published as "Letter from Birmingham City Jail" by the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers) in May 1963. King included a version of the full text in his 1964 book Why We Can't Wait.
The Birmingham Campaign moved forward. But in May, under the command of Public Safety Commissioner Theophilus "Bull" Connor, the police unleashed angry dogs on the demonstrators, and used fire hoses with pressure so intense they could legitimately be called "water cannons." These images were captured on film and shown on television. Any chance that Birmingham had to claim the moral high ground vanished.
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April 16, 1963 was a Tuesday. These baseball games were played that day:
* The New York Yankees lost to the Detroit Tigers, 7-2 at Yankee Stadium. Hank Aguirre outpitched Whitey Ford. Rocky Colavito went 3-for-4 with an RBI. Al Kaline went 1-for-4 with a walk and an RBI. For the Yankees, Tom Tresh went 3-for-4. Mickey Mantle did not play.
* The New York Mets lost to the Cincinnati Reds, 7-4 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Frank Robinson went 3-for-5 with 2 RBIs. Johnny Edwards went 3-for-3 with 3 RBIs. Pete Rose, in his 1st week as a major league player, went 1-for-4. Duke Snider hit a home run for the Mets.
* The Boston Red Sox beat the Baltimore Orioles, 6-1 at Fenway Park in Boston. Bill Monbouquette outpitched Robin Roberts. Carl Yastrzemski went 1-for-4. Dick Stuart went 2-for-4 with a home run and 4 RBIs. Brooks Robinson went 1-for-4 with an RBI.
* The Cleveland Indians beat the Washington Senators, 3-0 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Sam McDonwell pitched a 2-hit shutout, to outpitch Claude Osteen.
* The Kansas City Athletics beat the Chicago White Sox, 7-4 at Comiskey Park in Chicago.
* The Minnesota Twins beat the Los Angeles Angels, 11-10 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. It was 1-0 Angels in the 1st, 2-1 Twins after the 1st, 4-2 Angels in the 3rd, 5-5 after 5, and 7-5 Angels going to the bottom of the 9th. But Bob Allison hit a home run to save the Twins, and send the game to extra innings. Both teams scored 2 runs in the 11th. Buck Rodgers hit a sacrifice fly to give the Angels a 10-9 lead into the bottom of the 13th, but the Twins tied it, loaded the bases, and George Banks drew a walk to end it in victory for Minnesota. Oddly enough, the Twins' best-known player, Harmon Killebrew, did not appear in this long and wild game.
* The Milwaukee Braves beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 8-0 at Milwaukee County Stadium. Warren Spahn, just short of his 42nd birthday, pitched a 4-hit shutout, and even got a hit. Hank Aaron went 3-for-4 with a walk and an RBI. Joe Torre went 2-for-4.
* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 4-3 at the 1st Busch Stadium, which had been the last Sportsman's Park, in St. Louis. Stan Musial, in what turned out to be his last season, went 1-for-4 with an RBI. Roberto Clemente went 0-for-4.
* The Chicago Cubs beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 2-1 at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Ernie Banks won it with a sacrifice fly in the top of the 12th inning.
* And the San Francisco Giants beat the Houston Colt .45s, 7-0 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. (The Colt .45s became the Astros in 1965.) Willie Mays went 1-for-2 with 2 walks and an RBI.
Football was out of season. Game 2 of the NBA Finals was played at the Boston Garden, and the Boston Celtics beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 113-106. The Celtics would win the title in 6 games.
Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals was played at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. The Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Detroit Red Wings, 4-2. The Leafs would win the Cup at home 2 days later.
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