Every year around Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January, we start hearing about King’s best-known speech, delivered during the 1963 March on Washington.
We all know and have heard many times the vision of racial equality so beautifully expressed in King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech.
As his holiday approaches, his words will start to echo across the airways and the news along with pictures of 250,000 blacks and whites standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial on that hot, August day.
By the end of the day, we will all have revisited that iconic image of King, eloquent and, in retrospect, triumphant.
But that image of King does not tell the whole story. It is important to remember that the beautiful future King imagined has stayed in America’s heart not just because of the words, but because of its stark, positive contrast with the ugly reality of overt, institutionalized racism in the South.
Long before the dream, there were nightmares — as King and thousands of other black and white Americans took a stand to end Jim Crow segregation. Knowing their cause was just, they met terror with courage. They refused to be discouraged or deterred. Most of them faced hostility and verbal abuse; many faced physical danger or went to jail; a few gave their lives.
In spring 1963, King and other leaders of the civil rights movement were focusing their efforts on Birmingham, Ala., then known not only for harsh racial discrimination but for Ku Klux Klan attacks that earned the city the nickname “Bombingham.” On April 6, King and Ralph Abernathy marched through the city, knowing they would be arrested.
And so, four months before the “Dream” speech, King was in the full grip of the nightmare, languishing in a solitary-confinement cell in the Birmingham city jail.
But while he was in that dreary cell, a statement from local clergy denouncing the protests caught his eye, and King began to write a response. No one had laptops or mobile tablets in those days, but King had to make do even without a notebook, or a typewriter. He wrote in the margins of a newspaper and on scraps of paper, and his attorney smuggled his scribbling out of the jail for retyping, piece by piece.
King intended his essay as a rebuke to his white colleagues in the Alabama clergy, a plea for them to see the justness of his cause. But it became much more.
“Letter From a Birmingham Jail” is the prose counterpart to the “I Have a Dream” speech. It ends with hope, but it is also a chronicle of the fear, despair and disappointment that he and his colleagues were facing. A passionate but tightly reasoned argument for the justness and the urgency of his movement, the letter is used in writing classes today as a model of cogent, focused and persuasive argument.
There were no news cameras running there as King sat alone in his cell, so one must imagine him scribbling away, desperate to communicate with an outside world that still, in large part, didn’t understand his cause.
The moment we all know was still to come. But take a few minutes to read “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” and ponder how King’s nightmare became a dream we still know and believe in.
To read the letter, go to www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html.
TALES
'Never give up The Dream'
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