Paper Help

Affiliate ties

He was asked to come

Injustice is there

Why is King in Birmingham?

Compares himself with Paul

Cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states

Why is King in Birmingham?

“I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham.”

“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.”

Nonviolent campaign

Collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist

Negotiation

Self-purification

Direct action

“Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known.”

Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts.

There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation

Broken promises led to direct action (sit-ins, marches)

“As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community.”

Self-purification before acting

We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves:”Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?”

Why direct action? Why not negotiation?

The purpose of direct action is negotiation.

“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

Creative tension

King preaches against violent tension

Constructive nonviolent tension is necessary for growth

“I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.”

“Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

Are King’s actions untimely?

New elections yielded another segregationist

“I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.”

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr(d. 1971) has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

“Wait!”

King’s response

“Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!”

“It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

Asia and Africa are quickly moving toward political independence while the US lags behind.

The Litany of injuries

“But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking:”Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle nae becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “john,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

Breaking Laws

King wants people to obey the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in public schools.

Critics ask why he wants to obey certain laws and break other ones.

Just laws and unjust laws

How do you tell the difference?

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws.

Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

“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.”

“Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are 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.”

Conclusion:

All segregation statutes are unjust.

Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

Segregation gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority.

Hence, segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. [1-2]

Thus, All segregation statutes are unjust. [3]

An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal.

Proposition 8?

California law that bans same-sex marriage. Other states banned same-sex marriage, too.

Some states don’t have laws banning discrimination against transgendered people or homosexuals.

“By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.”

Another example?

“A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law.”

Breaking unjust laws is engaging in civil disobedience.

Practiced by the early Christians who were willing to face hungry lions

To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience.

In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.