run out and black businessmen urging King to retreat. If King defied the
judge’s order, he risked alienating allies in Washington who could outlaw
segregation. To obey the order, King recognized, would preserve a ‘raw
tyranny under the guise of maintaining law and order.’ On Good Friday, King
had an epiphany to obey an ‘injunction from heaven’ and transgress immoral
man-made laws. Promising to lead demonstrations until ‘Pharaoh lets God’s
people go,’ King marched to city hall and certain arrest. King thus followed
Christian and American traditions that sometimes an evil is so great that a
higher law must be obeyed. True to form, Connor put King in solitary
confinement until Resurrection Sunday, when the Kennedys intervened to
get him better treatment.
After King’s arrest, a group of white clergymen criticized Project C in a
full-page advertisement in the Birmingham News. The clergymen labeled the
protest as ‘unwise and untimely,’ the illegal actions of outside professional
agitators. Scribbling on the margins of that newspaper, King penned a ‘Letter
from Birmingham Jail,’ a classic summary of his nonviolent philosophy
[Doc. 8, p. 144]. By turns conciliatory and unyielding, King criticized white
moderates and the white church and explained that he was no ‘outside
agitator’ but a dutiful Christian fighting ‘injustice.’ King warned that if the
demonstrators were dismissed as ‘rabble rousers,’ millions of blacks would
turn to black nationalism, which would ‘lead inevitably to a frightening racial
nightmare.’
After a week in jail, King was released on bail, only to discover that the
demonstrations had fizzled out. A King associate admitted that ‘we needed
more troops’ because ‘we had scraped the bottom of the barrel of adults’ who
would go to jail. That reality led SCLC staffer James Bevel to call for a
children’s crusade: ‘We’re doing what we’re doing for the next generation, so
why shouldn’t the kids join the struggle?’ He noted that ‘a boy from high
school has the same effect in terms of being in jail, in terms of putting pres-
sure on the city, as his father, and yet there’s no economic threat to the family,
because the father is still on the job.’ The daring proposal left much of the
black community aghast.
As another stalemate loomed, King agreed that desperate circumstances
required desperate measures. On 2 May, hundreds of children – some as
young as 6 years old – gathered at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to
receive their ‘second baptism.’ After watching The Nashville Story, an inspira-
tional film of the sit-ins, the children left the sanctuary and joyously marched,
sang, and prayed for justice. They were soon herded onto paddy wagons and
school buses headed to jail, the southern gateway to freedom. Impressed by
the children’s bravery and appalled by police brutality, many adults sub-
mitted to arrest. This compelling story drew reporters to Birmingham from
around the country.82 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Letter from Birmingham
Jail: Martin Luther King’s
response to white clergy-
men who thought the
civil rights movement was
ill-timed.