Good Friday, Dr. King, and a letter that changed it all
It's a relevant conversation to us, more than 60 years later
In the Christian tradition, today is known as Good Friday.
Unlike the name would suggest, Good Friday marks the day Jesus died on the cross (and Easter then celebrates his resurrection, two days later). It’s typically a day of sadness and lament, of darkness and grief. Joy is not there. Hope is not yet present.
More often than not, I do not want to sit in haunting spaces of sorrow. I do not want to hang around in murky waters of death in order to more powerfully feel the effects of life a couple of days later.
I say this while holding the tension of the both/and: because I recognize how much more the two pair together, in more ways than one.
Perhaps that is why and how a paragraph in Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You stuck out to me the other day:
On April 3, 1963, King helped kick off a series of demonstrations in Birmingham, bringing on the wrath of the city’s ruggedly segregationist police chief, “Bull” Connor. Nine days later, on Good Friday, eight White anti-segregationist Alabama clergymen signed a public statement requesting that these “unwise and untimely” street demonstrations end. Martin Luther King Jr., jailed that same day, read the statement from his cell. Angry, he started doing something he rarely did. He responded to critics, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” published that summer.1
There was nothing good about the letter the eight White anti-segregationist clergymen wrote. They may have been opposed to segregation, but they were not in favor of the nonviolent tactics King and other members of the SCLC employed.
King had arrived in Birmingham a week earlier in a “direct action campaign to end segregation,” seeing as “non-violent marches were one of the key tactics that the organizers of the Birmingham campaign sought to employ.”2
However, when local representatives went to Bull Connor’s office to request a “permit to parade or demonstrate on the sidewalks of Birmingham,”3 Connor vehemently refused.
“No, you will not get a permit in Birmingham, Alabama to picket,” he replied. “I will picket you over to the City Jail.”4
Sit-ins and marches ensued. Even though the City of Birmingham had “obtained a court injunction prohibiting the leaders of the campaign from parading without a permit,”5 (and even though King had never violated a court injunction himself), the crew also decided that the decision not to march would end the campaign in Birmingham.
As such, Dr. King, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, and fifty other people decided to still march on Good Friday.
Jailed and arrested in turn, it was here that the eight clergymen penned the letter criticizing King and the Birmingham campaign. And it was also here, while in the stale jail cell, that King penned a famous letter to them in return.
No, hear me out: There wasn’t anything good about jailing the 52 protestors, nor was there anything good about eight clergymen believing this particular method of justice (and perhaps a more pressing need than marking one of the most important days in the church calendar yer).
There wasn’t anything good about the City of Birmingham trying to do everything in their power to keep racist laws in place and there wasn’t anything good about the injustice that continued to take place and continues to take place toward our Black and brown brothers and sisters.
But the letter King penned became one of the most important written documents of the era, serving “as a tangible, reproducible account of the long road to freedom in a movement that was largely centered around actions and spoken words.”6
Could it be said that the letter became an Easter of sorts, a point secular definitions call a turn or move to the east,7 particularly in the civil rights movement?
Sadness still exists, rightfully so. Darkness still marks this day. Work, so much work, is still to be done because injustice, so much injustice, is still present.
And also, maybe, hope lives on the horizon.
Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You. Page 161.
“The Good Friday parade: Birmingham — April 12, 1963,” https://www.scotusblog.com/2013/08/the-good-friday-parade-birmingham-april-12-1963/
“The Good Friday parade: Birmingham — April 12, 1963,”
“The Good Friday parade: Birmingham — April 12, 1963,”
“The Good Friday parade: Birmingham — April 12, 1963,”
https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/letter-from-birmingham-jail/ — please, take the time to read it (again) if you haven’t lately, or even, already.
https://time.com/4738876/easter-word-origin-history/