Today the New York Times published an eloquent, powerful op-ed (“For Those Who Wish to Fight Back but Don’t Know How“) by Jonathan Eig, author of the magnificent 2024 biography King: A Life.
Eig’s essay begins by evoking the assault against democracy and freedom reflected in the daily headlines:” “Great waves of cruelty pound us. Government officials use the law to attack the weak and vulnerable. Out of fear or indifference, citizens turn a blind eye to suffering and injustice.”
Eig reminds us that these were the conditions Black citizens faced under Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement and terrorism that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr described in his iconic 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” As friends of our USF Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice know well, our founding director emeritus Dr. Clarence B. Jones was with Dr. King in that jail cell in his role as legal counsel, and helped to smuggle the letter out of the jail into the world.
Eig reflects on the impact of King’s 1963 letter at the time, and its urgent importance in our own moment of moral emergency today.
You can find Eig’s op-ed here.
“What would Dr. King do today?,” he asks in conclusion.
“In his sermons, speeches and essays, he gave us the answer. He told us that while elected officials may try to divide us by stoking resentment and rage, we shouldn’t let them. He reminded us of our essential goodness and encouraged us to trust and rely on the goodness of others. He told us not to expect immediate results. We often forget, in telling Dr. King’s story today, how many of his organized protests were judged failures in their time, from Albany, Ga., to Chicago. Even his efforts in Birmingham were faltering for weeks, with participation falling off and media interest fading, until the city’s youth joined the protests and reinvigorated the movement.
Today Dr. King would certainly call on elected leaders to change unjust policies, and he would get specific in his demands. He rejected counsels of gradualism or moderation, yet he didn’t dismiss his opponents as unreachable. He might call for economic boycotts to pressure business leaders, as he did in Birmingham. He might lean on the respectability of clergy, as he often did, to seize the moral high ground. That might mean asking clergy members to stand at schoolhouse doors to block the removal of children of undocumented immigrants.
As we consider our own actions, it’s worth remembering that Dr. King made the choice to get arrested on April 12, 1963, in Birmingham, intentionally violating a local court order that banned marches and protests. Yes, he was breaking the law, but with his action, he sought to demonstrate that American law itself was broken and in need of repair.
For everyone who believes Dr. King’s words, sitting on the sidelines is not an option.
“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here,” he 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.”
The Times published the following brief comment I submitted in response to Eig’s piece:
I am grateful to Jonathan Eig for this essay, which is so clear and true.
In his “Mountaintop” speech delivered at the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968, the night before he was assassinated, Dr. King reflected on the parable of the Good Samaritan. Many people passed the wounded man lying by the side of a dangerous road. “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” They asked. “But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: “‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'”
King was speaking about the Memphis sanitation workers. And across time he is speaking about all victims of cruelty, the fired government workers, immigrants subject to mass deportation, the dissidents subject to government persecution, and the poorest and most vulnerable people who are threatened by the evisceration of humanitarian programs of all kinds, whose lives and survival now depend on us.
“It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world,” King told us that evening. “It’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.”
Jonathan D. Greenberg
