Carl Kruse Celebrates MLK Day
Re-reading A Letter From A Birmingham Jail
by Carl Kruse
In what has become now a tradition, ( see Carl Kruse Talks About Martin Luther King ),
every Martin Luther King Day I re-read King’s now classic “Letter From A Birmingham Jail,”
an essay written as a response to King’s critics who at the time called his activities of
nonviolent resistance against racism “untimely and unwise.”
His essay is one of best justifications for civil disobedience found outside the writings of
Gandhi.
King also wrote here about the need to act sooner rather than later, what makes for just versus
unfair laws, and ruminates on the connection between all of us in a beautiful discussion of
ethics found in few other modern American letters.
At the time King had urged the local authorities in the American south to obey U.S. federal
anti-discrimination laws but at the same time encouraged violation of local ordinances that