Letter from Birmingham Jail

By Martin Luther King Jr.

APRIL 16, 1963
I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth century prophets left their little villages and carried their “Thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Greco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.
We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights.
A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law.
Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman empire.
I’m grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle.
Was not Jesus an extremist for love — “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you”? Was not Amos an extremist for justice — “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream”? Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ — “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus”? Was not Martin Luther an extremist — “Here I stand; I can do none other, so help me God”? Was not John Bunyan an extremist — “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience”? Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist — “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free”? Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”? So the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be? Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?
In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill, three men were crucified. We must not forget that all three were crucified for the same crime — the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thusly fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth, and goodness and thereby rose above his environment.
There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days, the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.” But they went on with the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven” and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest.
We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.
One day, the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage and thusly carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.