Martin Luther King — The Extremist

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was an extremist and thanks to a letter from 11 white ministers he learned to be proud of that label. It all comes out in a letter he wrote to them as he sat in a Birmingham, Alabama jail charged with ‘parading without a permit.’ In that same letter, in a part that seems to echo our world today, he expresses his disappointment in “white moderates.”

The letter was written in April of 1963. Four months later, in August, he would deliver his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, marking the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is rightfully considered one of his greatest speeches and one of the greatest speeches made in America. The seeds of that speech can be found in that letter he wrote.

The letter written by the ministers had chided him, calling him an “outsider” whose involvement in the demonstrations was “unwise and untimely” and that he and the other demonstrators should leave it to the courts to handle. They argued in their letter that although the demonstrations were “technically peaceful” they can incite “hatred and violence.”

“We appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.”

In his letter in response, Dr. King in turn chided them for accepting things as they were — to wait. “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,’ he wrote, adding that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

“Jesus Christ was an extremist for love, truth and goodness.”

Dr. King clearly took it that the ministers were calling him an extremist, saying that at first he was disappointed that he was being called an extremist, but then as he thought about it, he became satisfied with that label because “was not Jesus an extremist for love…. Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel… was not Martin Luther an extremist… and John Bunyan… and Abraham Lincoln… and Thomas Jefferson.”

“So, the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists, we will be,” he wrote.

Dr. King also chided the “white moderates” of the day who he said were more of a “stumbling block” for the Blacks seeking recognition than the KKK because they sat on the sidelines doing nothing. Or as he put it, they were “more devoted to order than to justice.”

Somewhat surprisingly he is most scornful of the church, more specifically “white churchmen (who) stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.” He writes that he “wept over the laxity of the church” but he said those tears were “tears of love.”

In those words, both about the church and the ‘white moderates,’ you can see his anger coming out. You can see it even more though when he writes about his children.

He writes about the ‘tears welling up’ in his six-year-old daughter’s eyes when she is told she can’t go to the amusement park she’s seen advertised on television because it ‘is closed to colored children.’ Or when he has to ‘concoct an answer’ for his five-year-old son when the son asks why ‘white people treat colored people so mean.’ The son would be Martin Luther King III who is now in his 60’s and the daughter would be Yolanda King who died in 2007 of cardiac issues aged 52.

You can understand that anger when he writes about sleeping in his car on trips because ‘no motel will accept you’ but especially when he writes, “when your first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (no matter how old you are) and your last name becomes ‘John.’”

(NOTE: Dr. King later made an audio recording of that letter. In that recording, you don’t hear so much anger in his voice as you see in the written word. I believe it is because it is a recording made many years later. The tone is dramatically different from his speeches. Also it should be noted he did not record many parts of the letter in which there are references to specific people.)

The glory of Dr. King today lies in many ways in the powerful speeches he delivered. It is hard even today to watch them and not have a strong emotional reaction. They were all built on the strong, but simple, message of Justice. It’s a word he uses 25 times in the letter.

But in that letter you also see the incredible intellectual foundation that formed the basis for his thinking and his words and his faith. In the same letter in which he cites Jesus, the Apostle Paul, St. Augustine and Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, he cites Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, American Reformed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and Socrates (three times).

In his final speech before that fateful day, he cites not only Socrates but Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Aristophanes and many more. But it is only in that letter that you see the depth of his understanding of those great philosophers.

In my opinion, I’ve Been to the Mountaintop is even more powerful a speech than his I’ve got a Dream speech. Maybe it’s because it was that last speech, that speech in which he almost seemed to predict his murder, that speech in which he was so happy that he hadn’t sneezed after the stabbing, that speech in which he said he’d been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land, that speech in which he said he feared no man because “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”